


With Strange Aeons

by RunawayMarbles



Series: Not Cover Art [5]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Cthulhu Mythos, F/M, M/M, background max/anne, eventual OT3, implied eventual ot4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 08:56:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 59,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14931185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayMarbles/pseuds/RunawayMarbles
Summary: After the disappearance and presumed death of Captain Flint and Long John Silver, Max smuggles Jack and Anne to Oglethorpe’s plantation. Thomas learns that not only do the three of them have a friend in common, but he is not the only one whose dreams are haunted by a strange city and a terrifying name.Meanwhile, Flint and Silver try to escape an island trapped in time, impossibly built and impossibly old. Along the way they’re forced question reality, each other, and themselves.And in his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.(Prior knowledge of Lovecraft is fun, but not required.)





	1. Dreams of Different Persons

**Author's Note:**

> The Cthulhu Mythos included here is mostly limited to what's included in [The Call of Cthulhu](https://fictional.fm/library/the-call-of-cthulhu-by-h-p-lovecraft/), for everyone's sanity. I've included character names and easter eggs (I believe there's twelve, if you want to play I-Spy) from the original story, but it's not required reading for this story. 
> 
> (If you google "how to pronounce Cthulhu," you'll get a video of a guy claiming Lovecraft wanted it pronoucned something like "khlul-hloo." However Lovecraft was a racist who has been dead for 81 years, and so the characters in this story are saying either "kuh-thu-loo" or "kuh-too-loo" depending on your personal preference.)
> 
> Credit for the Timey-Whimey nature of R'lyeh goes to [this Mentalfloss Article](http://mentalfloss.com/article/59676/weird-physics-hp-lovecrafts-corpse-city-rlyeh)
> 
> Eternal thanks to:  
> Marginson, for this awesome cover art [(animated version)](https://marginson.tumblr.com/post/174891480058/with-strange-aeons-a-silverflint-bigbang-fic-by)  
> ([animated version on my tumblr in case of future url changes](http://runawaymarbles.tumblr.com/post/174891570817/marginson-with-strange-aeons-a-silverflint))  
> Lacecat/@jamesbarlow, for beta reading and putting up with like three months of nonsense  
> jauneclair for also beta reading and letting me screech about the bible for a bit

 

_The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

 

It feels like the edge of the world. 

The fog is so dense Silver can’t see past the rail. Next to him, Flint stands in perfect detail, but the men lose focus just a few feet away.

For a long moment, it’s peaceful.

And then they clear the fog, and Flint rounds on De Groot. An argument starts, and the quiet breaks.

They’d left Maroon Island a couple weeks prior, searching for provisions and extra weapons. It’s been a delicate balance of chasing ships with needed supplies without risking loss of the men they’ll need for their attack on Nassau. Merchant captains are either cowards, handing over everything they have, or they’ve brought some armed soldiers along for protection. Not only the _Walrus_ crew’s survival, but their entire war effort, depends on being able to guess which is which.

At least hunting prizes again helps the men’s morale, giving them a taste of the freedom they can expect after Nassau is theirs.

And sometimes, going through the prize ships’ cargo, Silver can find books for Madi. It’s not stealing from a prize if he deducts it from his share later, but he still tries not to let Flint see him do it. He always gets this heartbroken look on his face, and it’s not hard to imagine who he’s thinking of. His habit of bringing books to the Barlow woman— _Miranda Hamilton,_ and Silver treasures that information along with everything else Flint has given him— wasn’t entirely a secret.

But there are no prizes, no books to be won today.

The route they’d been sailing was easy. Silver himself could have done it. But instead of the lush islands and helpful cliffs flanking the shipping channels to the west, they’re facing down what looks like a chunk of rock backed by the rising sun.

“Could we have turned during the night, in the fog?” Silver asks, trying not to look as agitated as he feels. He’s certainly doing a better job than Flint. If looks could kill— well, the entire crew would have been dead years ago, but they’d be particularly dead right now. 

“Gone off course? Perhaps. Completely reversed direction?” De Groot flings up his hands. “Not unless the night watch was very, very stupid.”

Silver looks at Dooley.

“We were sailing _west,”_ Dooley insists, trying to disappear behind the wheel. “We didn’t change anything!”

“Unless the sun decided to just change directions for a day—”

“Well I know we’re not sailing west _now.”_

This doesn’t happen. Not with as skilled a navigator as De Groot, not with a course as simple as this. Silver leans against the rail and tries to will away the headache that’s growing along with the pain in his leg.

“Right,” he says.

The island is close enough that he can make out a tall pillar of stone at the top, and what could either be large rocks or houses below. Nothing about it looks inviting. Had they seen it last night, through the fog, he reckons he could have come up with a ghost story or two by now.

Silver waves De Groot away and looks back to Flint.

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m never sleeping again if this is what happens when I look away for a few minutes.”

That is… not what Silver had meant, and he thinks Flint knows it. “We do need to supply.”

“If that’s a town, there’s no way we can approach undetected, and no way to tell if they have enough resources be worth raiding.”

And they’d lose at least a couple days making the stop. “Not to mention that the last time we happened upon a strange island, we ended up in cages.”

“But you met Madi.”

 _And you found a war_. Silver tries to look offended. “I certainly don’t know what you’re implying.”

Flint looks a little less angry. A little more fond.

Silver has survived by learning the captain’s expressions, and they’re starting to do something to him that he tries not to think about.

“The men will want to make land,” says De Groot, who hadn’t retreated more than a couple steps and also isn’t wrong. 

“We’ll need to take on water. Who’s to say when we’ll find it again.” Flint manages to make it sound like a threat and a condemnation at the same time. “Continue our approach." 

 

* * *

 

 

It takes a few hours for the edges of the island to coalesce into shapes Silver can comprehend. But even as he does, he thinks he must be mistaken, because. 

The houses are not a town.

Tall and sharp and walled, it can only be appropriately described as a city. But a city unlike any he’s ever seen.

What Silver had taken from a distance to be a cliff face looks, upon closer inspection, like a massive building— or perhaps a cluster of them— jutting up out of the highest point. They blend so smoothly with the ground that it almost looks as though they were carved from the island itself.

“We’ll have to leave some men to guard the ship,” Flint says from Silver’s left, voice low enough to keep the conversation private. “Agreed?”

Flint has been doing this, lately. Giving him openings to opine on his strategies. Perhaps he views it as an extension of the sword-fighting lessons, or some form of public deference to Silver’s new role. 

When he had first heard of Billy’s mad scheme to make him king, Silver had never imagined Flint being so willing to build him a throne.

“Agreed.” 

“Perhaps you should stay with them.”

He could have lots of reasons for suggesting that. Silver’s leg. The fact that the crew is far less likely to sail away if Silver is there to stop them, because even months and a war removed from a mutiny is still too close for full trust between Flint and the men. Or just that this is how they’ve always done it, on all those raids after Charles Town. Flint goes. Silver stays.

But it also means, “so we’ve already decided you’ll be the one to disembark?”

Flint turns his head, watching Silver out of the corner of his eye. “Is that a problem all of a sudden?”

They had had a lot more information going into their past raids, and at the time Flint hadn’t been inclined to follow any of Silver’s advice. Silver had been angry enough— with Flint, with himself, with God— that he thought he’d be able to stomach losing him.

He’s less sure of that now.

“Well, if we need to charm any locals, I’m not sure you’re the one to do it.”

He gets another round of side-eye for that. “You want us both to go?”

“What, you don’t trust the men to be on their own?”

“ _Someone_ got the ship entirely turned around by a bit of fog, and it wasn’t either of us.”

That’s not an unfair point. Silver looks up at the building-cliffs. There is nothing enticing about them, and yet they make Silver curious in a way that nothing has since a cook tried to hide a piece of paper from him. It’s not only that he doesn’t want Flint to go without him, but he wants to know what’s up there. He’s never seen anything like it, and his lifespan isn’t looking too long these days. And if there are allies or enemies to be had here, he will be at Flint’s side. If only to keep him from starting a war on two fronts.

“We both go,” Silver says. “I’m sure the men are up to the challenge of remaining in one place.”

 

* * *

 

  

Thomas is not mad.

He wasn’t mad when they dragged him from his home, he wasn’t mad when they told him he was sick but they could make him better with icy water and warm hands, and he wasn’t mad when they put him on a ship and he wasn’t mad when they tossed him out into the swampy air and told him he was safe.

Not being mad is the only thing he has.

Even if he’s awakened again with ink on his fingers, and the same words scribbled in the _Gospel of Luke_ , over and over, like a punishment from when he was small. He’d had no light when writing— his eyes hadn’t even been open— and yet the words are perfectly neat and spaced. Not even smudged, like they often are when his instincts kick back in and he writes with his left hand.

It’s the fourth time this week. He’s lost count of how many times it’s happened since it started a few months ago, but the evidence is littered through his Bible.

_In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

There’s a rational explanation for all of this. Old Castro from Bethlem had talked about Cthulhu all the time. He’d scratched images of a monster into the wall. _He_ had been mad. But Thomas had thought of him, periodically, so it makes sense that he might dream about those stories. About the city.

That’s all this is. He just has to hide the evidence, and he won’t be mad.

But hiding had been easier before he had a roommate.

Three weeks ago, two new prisoners had arrived. They aren’t nobles. Not everyone on the plantation is, of course, but they’re all of high birth in one form or another. From families with money enough to send them away, and visible enough to have to do so. Men come in pale-handed and angry and they die sun-browned and bitter. Scandals, errant political views, buggerers, and cowards are the norm.

These people hadn’t been that.

To start with, one was a woman. A woman in breeches with long, matted hair and a sneer so fixed she may have been born with it. Several knives had been taken away from her when she arrived, but no man who missed the company of women dared smile at her for fear she’d acquired some more.

Her companion had made less of an impression. His name is Jack and he speaks like he’s educated but has calluses that imply otherwise.

They cannot room together, of course, for they are not married. “But Anne can stay with Thomas here,” Oglethorpe had said. “He won’t bother her.”  _If you know what I mean._

The idea that Thomas could bother Anne had made both Jack and Anne sneer.

Anne, however, is fully capable of bothering _Thomas._ She doesn’t talk much, but Jack is always sneaking into their room after dark. They stay up late whispering, seeming unconcerned with what Thomas hears. Escape comes up frequently. Thomas hopes they do it soon— or at least annoy Jack’s roommates instead— so he can have his privacy back. So far, they haven’t either noticed or cared about his nighttime writings, but…

_In his house in R’lyeh…_

He isn’t getting back to sleep now. He’s got the sudden urge to say the words aloud, and that might be the last straw. After a few seconds he gets up, an excuse about the outhouse on the tip of his tongue should anyone ask.

Anne and Jack are tangled up in each other, but they don’t stir. Thomas closes the door as quietly as he can.

Savannah is a swamp. Bugs of a sort he’d never thought about in London, and air that feels like it’s choking him. Men back then used to speak of the New World like it was a gift from God. A land made perfect, rich in resources just waiting for English men to reach out and take them. Clearly, those men had never been to Savannah.

Thomas Hamilton had never thought the land was given by God, but he’d been there with them on the rest. Oh, he’d known England created her own vices, but he’d thought he could escape all that. He’d wanted to build a place where he could kindly, lovingly, make a profit.

_Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

He’s not mad.

_In his house in R’lyeh._

Thomas crouches over the outhouse, waiting for a bowel movement that isn’t going to come, and he gives in. Whispers: “Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The words feel right, in a way no words have felt right since he said to Miranda, _take care of James,_ since he said to his father, _it’s the right thing to do._

The words feel right, and they shouldn’t, because they mean nothing to him. They don’t deserve a place with those memories.

“In his house in R’lyeh,” he says, pronouncing it _ril-ee-aay._ “Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

He can’t hide in the outhouse forever.

But as it turns out, he can’t go back to bed.

The prisoners live in a long building, divided into segments, each with one door leading to the outside. Officially it’s so that they don’t wake up others if they need to relieve themselves in the night, but Thomas suspects the real reason is so that their movement can be more closely monitored.

When he gets to the door, he can hear voices.

So much for his sleeping roommates.

“—with Edward fucking Teach, and won a battle with the British Navy, and I can’t just sit here.” That’s Jack. He’s much better spoken than Anne, and sometimes his book knowledge without formal education reminds Thomas of James. He doesn’t know what to make of Jack, other than that, although he’s found that the edict that there are no last names at Oglethorpe’s farm— for they have left their families behind— clearly rankles the man in a way that shackles and farm work never could.

“It ain’t fair,” Anne says back. “I hate it, but we can’t just run into the swamp, although it would fucking serve her—”

“She saved us.” Jack. “I believe, or I believe she believes, that she was saving us. I thought maybe— but if she were coming to get us, she would have—”

“She’s not.”

They’re pirates. Thomas isn’t an idiot. He’d shaken Jack’s hand and felt the same callouses he had known so well on James, from guns and blades and sail rope. But Jack has none of James’s Navy bearings. Anne’s hands had look the same, and there’s only one woman like that so famous someone might pay to hide her away here. 

The others have probably worked it out as well. Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny were well known enough from the _Boston News-Letters_ , back when the fight for Nassau had been at its peak. Before the disappearance of Captain Flint and Long John Silver.

That must be how they ended up here.

They’ve gone silent for long enough that Thomas thinks it’s safe enough to open the door and act like he hasn’t heard anything— but as soon as he does, and his eyes adjust to the candle they’ve lit, he forgets all the manners he ever learned.

“Get your hands off my wine,” he says, lunging forward. He’s been hiding that stolen bottle for years, thinking he’ll save it for his worst day. And every bad day he’s thought, no, not this one. The idea of it has gotten him through more moments than he can remember, and now there only looks to be a quarter left. They can’t have drunk that much in the time he was gone; they must have been working on it for days, at least.

“Is this your wine?” Jack asks. “Only we were under the impression that none of us were allowed anything nicer than cheap rum.” Enough to keep them from plotting, not enough to make them useless.

Thomas snatches the bottle away from him. “Fucking pirates.” It’s just wine, he thinks, it’s just wine and he doesn’t have to get so angry, but it’s not just wine and there’s something dark and bitter growing under his tongue.

Anne moves her hand to her side like she’s going for a knife. It’s either instinct, or she’s managed to steal a one from the kitchens despite being kept pointedly away.

If she wants to stab him, she can go ahead and then have to explain it to someone. Thomas cradles the bottle like it’s a baby. “It’s ironic, really.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “What is?”

What’s _not?_ That bitter taste is growing and he’s tired and he’s _not mad_ and he needs someone to understand that. “I ended up here because I tried to help you, and you steal my wine.”

“I thought you were here for buggery,” Jack says.

“Well, yes. But noble sons don’t get banished for that.  They get the farthest flung family lands and a good protestant wife.” And anyone who might know anything gets a significant sum of money. “That was just the excuse. My father is— was— the Lord Proprietor of New Providence Island, and he tasked me with a way to eliminate the problem of piracy.”

Anne’s sneer becomes even more pronounced. Jack, on the other hand, leans forward. The room is small enough that that effectively puts him in Thomas’s face.

“When was this?”

“Oh-five, or so.” It takes Thomas more time than it should to remember what year it is now. “We came up with a plan to pardon the pirates, and my father saw fit to ruin the lives of everyone working with me.” Except for Peter. When the word came that Governor Ashe had been killed, Thomas’s grief had been tinged with a bitter sense of justice.

In another life, he might have prayed for forgiveness.

“What, like Woodes Rogers?” Anne says the name like it’s something loathsome.

Thomas doesn’t disagree. At first, he had thought that Woodes Rogers using his plan, with the full backing of the crown, meant he was free. That someone would come for him. They couldn’t give him his life back, not if they wanted to save face, but maybe they would let him start over under a new name in the colonies.

But no one came.

And he realized that the only two people who knew where he was were dead.

At the hands of pirates.

Hilarious.

“No,” he says. “Woodes Rogers is using my plan, sitting happy on—” _my island—_ “New Providence, and I’m here. So. Not very much like Woodes Rogers at all.”

Jack leans even closer to him.

At this angle, if Jack takes a swing, he won’t be able to damage Thomas very much.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“What?”

“You said _we_ came up with a plan,” Jack says. “Who is we?”

Anne sucks in a breath.

“Me,” Thomas says. “The late Governor Ashe. My wife. A representative from the Navy.”

“What was his name?”

“The liaison—?”

“Yes!”

Thomas puts his hand against Jack’s face and shoves him backwards. “Why the hell do you need to know?”

“Just tell me! Please.”

“McGraw.” It’s been a long time since he’s said the name out loud, and he should be more careful, but he isn’t. The bitterness eases as he speaks. “James McGraw.” _James McGraw_. His voice probably softens on it, but there’s nothing he can do about that now. “What’s it to you?”

“Because I heard that same story,” Jack says, “from Captain James Flint.”

Captain Flint? “What are you talking about?”

“That about ten years ago, he, a woman, the woman’s husband, and Peter Ashe came up with a plan to pardon the pirates of Nassau.”

That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t— that can’t— “You heard this from Flint?”

Jack is leaning forwards again, and maybe it’s Thomas that’s going to have to hit Jack. He doesn’t like his chances against the both of them, but he likes Jack in his face even less. “Well, I heard it from Max who heard it from Eleanor who heard it from Flint, so for all intents and purposes, yes.” The first two names mean nothing to him, but—

Flint.

Flint, the pirate, the pirate who left Charles Town in flames and rubble, Flint who terrorized the colonies and islands, Flint who tried to declare war on England herself. Flint, the captain so fearsome some men barely dared speak his name lest he bring his bloody judgment down upon them. Flint who— Flint who?

James should be with Peter’s friends, with Miranda.

Captain Flint had killed Peter.

“Describe him to me.” It takes effort to make his voice above a whisper.

“Um, reddish hair, smooth talker, always angry."

Instead of hitting Jack, Thomas stands. The room is only three paces or so, but he presses himself into the corner, arms still wrapped around his wine, facing down the figures in the darkness. 

James had often been angry, with quiet rage that would simmer under the surface, so controlled most men could hardly see it. It had enticed Thomas, who had never been allowed to be lose his temper. He’d prod at it, sometimes, just to see what that anger could do. But it had never been unleashed at Thomas, or at Miranda.

He had wondered, occasionally, what James could be without that control.

“More,” Thomas says. “What color are his eyes?” James’s eyes had been so green.

“I… never noticed,” Jack says. “Wait a second.” And oh, Thomas has stepped in it, because one shouldn’t remember the eye color of a man they knew as colleagues ten years past, should they?

Anne frowns. “Jack—”

“Were you sent here for buggering Captai— James McGraw?”

Thomas considers beaming him with the bottle. It’s only an old instinct. They all know what he is here. He hasn’t been able to hide for years.

But he can’t say yes, either.

“I was sent here for improper politics.”

“Oh my _god_. You _were_.” Jack sticks a middle finger up towards the ceiling. “I just lost a wager.”

Anne curls her lip. “You made a bet with Charles on whether Flint preferred men?”

“Yes?” 

“And you bet _no?_ But what about—” she looks at Thomas, and stops. But he doesn’t care, can’t care about what she’s going to say, because he’d been so caught up in the idea that he’d forgotten the fact that brought Jack and Anne here in the first place.

Captain Flint has been missing for months, and is presumed dead.

“Do you know what happened to him?” he asks.

They both look down. Like they’d forgotten, in the excitement of the revelation.

“They was looking for supplies,” Anne says. “We were back guarding the— the camp. Should have been a short trip, but they never came back. Thought the crew had mutinied and made a run for it, but no ports saw ‘em, and there was no wreckage, no storms in the area.”

Jack spreads his hands. “Gunpowder explosion, maybe. His ship could have caught fire on open waters, and sank, with nothing to find.”

Thomas thinks of James burning alive, and closes his eyes.

He’d hoped. The whole time, he’d thought, _at least James and Miranda are safe._

“The woman,” he says. “You mentioned a woman. Who is she?”

“We knew her as the Barlow woman,” Jack says, in the past tense. “Well, I say _knew._ I don’t think I ever saw her. Rumor on the island was just that he had a woman in the interior. Some people said she was a witch.”

Anne clears her throat. “Eleanor met her a few times. She sailed with Flint to Charles Town, to try and get pardons from the governor. She didn’t come back, and Flint had Charles Town destroyed.”

Jack opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, and Anne puts a hand over his, shaking her head. Like whatever he had to add is too awful to add, like there’s anything that could possibly make this worse.

Thomas sits down very slowly, because if he doesn’t he thinks he might collapse.

_James and Miranda are both dead._

Maybe it wasn’t them. Maybe it wasn’t them, but what other red-haired charismatic angry man would have thought he could persuade Peter _Ashe_ of anything, would have dared talk to him in the first place, would have come to Nassau with the other half of Thomas’s story?

_James and Miranda are dead._

He’d read about Charles Town in the newspaper, had noted only the passing of Peter.

Miranda had died there, and she was never mentioned. Miranda had died there, and Thomas had had no idea.

_Miranda and James are dead._

“I’d like to go to sleep now,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

The water is deep enough that the ship can come to rest next to a flat ledge of rock. It looks intentionally made, and yet it’s clearly not a port: any shallow draft vessels could go onto the rocky beach around the cliff, and any bigger ship would have more cargo than could be carried up a trail one man wide.

Silver is the first over the rail, hanging from the side of the _Walrus_ on a rope ladder. He takes a deep breath, and then kicks off of the hull with his good leg, swinging forward. The landing jars his knee, but he doesn’t fall into the sea, drop his bag, or make a fool of himself in front of his men, so he counts it as successful.

One day, he won’t be so lucky.

Eyeing the path, it occurs to him that he should have brought his crutch. He could ask someone to get it, but at this point, it wouldn’t look kingly, would it?

Flint hops off next to him, and the two of them move out of the way for the thirteen other men elected to accompany them.

“We’ll meet you here in a couple days’ time,” Silver had told De Groot. “Unless the city is hostile, in which case I’d imagine we shall be coming back rather quickly.”

De Groot had sighed. “We’ll be ready to make a fast departure.”

The path isn’t going to allow them a hasty retreat. Silver’s job, he decides then, is making sure they won’t need one. Aside from their weapons, each man is carrying a full day’s rations of food and water: if they avoid a fight while scoping out the city, they could return at a leisurely stroll.

There’s nothing leisurely about their current hike. The hill isn’t much steeper than the one Silver and Flint have been sparring on, but the ground is less forgiving under his feet. Instead of the greens and blues of Maroon Island, the whole place is gray. Even the sky has turned a flat slate color.

At the first turn, they get a better view of the city. A large bit of it is visible over the walls, built at the base of what Silver can only think of as a monolith. It’s at the opposite end of the island from where they’re standing, but it’s so huge and so high it seems like it’s right in front of them. The buildings look ever so slightly _off,_ as well, but perhaps that’s the distance and the monolith’s absurd scale.

There’s also no signs of life.

That’s not unheard of, for a city that’s just spotted a strange pirate vessel.

Still. “Could it possibly be empty?” Silver asks, turning his head slightly. Flint is right behind him, and though Silver knows it’s to catch him if he slips, he pretends not to.

“Anything’s possible,” Flint says, like it’s a helpful answer. “I don’t see why anyone would go to all the trouble of building such a thing if there was no way to live here.”

“Maybe a native tribe?” As far as Silver’s heard, there haven’t been natives on many of the islands around here in a few generations, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t leave something behind.

An uninhabited city nobody has heard of could be useful. A place easier to defend than Nassau, a place they could go, and all live in peace—

He tries to imagine the Maroons here, surrounded by the grayish green stone, and he can’t quite do it.

And all of that is contingent on there being food and water.

An hour and a half of walking and they have yet to see any sign of either— not even a weed growing between cracks in the rock. Yet path they’re on must be used, because it ends at an opening in the city walls.

Silver is probably dizzy from the climb, even if he isn’t especially tired. He takes a careful drink from his canteen, closes his eyes, and opens them again.

The city is still…

Wrong.

What he’d thought was a wall is actually the top level of buildings, and while from a distance the city had looked as if it was built on a hill, it now appears to have been carved into the bottom of a massive bowl. It’s full of tall structures with more stories than Silver has ever seen. Stairways extend between them, twisting and crossing in a manner not unlike a spiders web, linking what might be the fifth level of one building to the seventh or eighth of another.

It’s far bigger than it looked from the ground,

Silver turns to Flint.

“Not a native tribe.”

Flint’s mouth is hanging open. He’s composed, really, compared to the rest of them— Bobby is muttering prayers, and when Silver looks back, he sees that Joji’s hands are shaking.

Somehow, it’s that fact that makes him afraid. 

“We stay in a group,” Flint says. “People could be lying in wait. Keep your weapons close, but not out— we don’t want to provoke an attack if we don’t have to.”

 _Because if they can build this, who knows what they could do to us._ No one says it, but Silver can’t be the only one with the thought.

They don’t walk forward as much as shuffle, staying close together like they’re still in the confines of a ship.

What Silver had taken for a road looks more like a small square as he steps out into it. Above them, the buildings and staircases rise, but they seem lower— no— 

The lines and angles aren’t right when he looks at them. The buildings seem as if they’re about to tip over and crush everyone below, but they look miles away at the same time. The ground is tilting up into a steep hill even as it remains flat. It makes Silver’s head hurt to just look around, and his stump is twinging in time with his heartbeat.

Every surface is under an undisturbed layer of slick grime.

The men still look correct, and that’s the only thing Silver can focus on, to remind himself that it is the city and not himself that is wrong. The lines of Flint’s face and shoulders are all precisely where they’re supposed to be as he steps into what might be the middle of the square.

“Hullo!” Flint shouts.

It doesn’t echo.

“We haven’t come for a fight,” he continues, turning a little. Silver looks up and a staircase is swinging for him— he flinches and it’s at least twenty meters above his head. “We’d like to trade for food and water!”

Silence.

Dr. Howell walks into a wall.

It would be funny. It should be funny. It’s not at all funny, because until Howell proved otherwise, Silver had thought that wall was flat ground.

Slowly, Flint approaches one of the buildings, arms slightly in front of him. Like he’s drunk. Like he isn’t the only spot of color in the gray-green landscape they’ve landed in. He feels along what looks like a closed door, and without opening it, he walks inside and disappears.

Silver realizes his breathing has gotten very fast.

He tries to inhale.

Flint is out already, shaking his head. “Black as tar in there,” he says. “Anyone have a torch?”

Dooley does. Flint lights it and makes a careful way back in, and this time, Silver follows him. Trying to match Flint’s footsteps as best he can to avoid the fate of the now bruised doctor.

Dooley is close behind. The rest hesitate.

“Keep watch,” Silver says.

It looks like there’s a heavy stone door blocking the way Flint had gone, but as Silver gets closer, he realizes that it’s slightly ajar. By the time he’s standing in front of it, the door has been fully open the whole time, affixed at a steep angle to the hinge. Silver reaches out to touch it, and when he closes his eyes, it feels perfectly vertical.

But when he looks, it’s still at that broken angle.

He steps through.

The inside of the— is it a house? It doesn’t look like a store or a workshop and it’s too small for a tavern. It’s barren, just walls and floors.

There's another doorway on the far wall, and Silver follows Flint through that one as well. The light from outside isn't visible through it, leaving them with only the torch.

The walls are easier look at like this, just a small segment at a time.

“What the fuck.”

Silver’s hand is on his sword before he recognizes Dooley’s voice. Flint swings the torch around.

“Go back and tell the men to search the other buildings. First levels only, and in pairs,” Flint says. “Leave two outside to keep watch.”

Dooley’s footsteps retreat, slow and halting. Silver turns to Flint.

“Please tell me you have an explanation.”

Flint says nothing.

“You have an explanation for everything,” Silver hisses. “An answer to everything. Please tell me—”

Flint’s hand lands on his shoulder, and it’s the first time they’ve touched in— in weeks? “I don’t,” Flint says. “This is— the shapes here are wrong.”

“How can _shapes_ be wrong.” If his voice gets too loud, the men are going to know that he’s panicking, and then they’ll panic, so he tries to keep it down. “They’re shapes! They can’t just— _not_ be shapes.”

“I don’t—”

“Know. Of course.” He can’t expect Flint to know this, there’s no reason Flint should know this, except that for all Silver hates it when Flint acts like he knows everything, he could use some of that confidence right now.

“It hasn’t even been an hour. We can’t all lose our minds yet.”

That’s when someone screams.

Flint pulls his hand back.

“Go,” Silver says. “I’ll follow you.”

Flint nods, and then he’s out of the room, taking the light with him. Silver takes a deep breath, and then moves forward as fast as he thinks he can without falling, because he doesn’t know if he could get back up right now with these angled walls and how badly his leg hurts.

When he gets outside, the men are gone, and for a moment he thinks the worst— but there are loud voices coming from one of the building across from him. When he approaches it, his muscles strain like he’s walking up a steep hill.

Everyone still seems to be standing upright, nobody has lost a limb, and they all move aside as he enters. “What was it?”

“Sorry,” Paxton says. “Howard’s just a jumpy bastard. It startled us is all.”

“What did… oh.”

Silver sees it.

Carved onto the floor— no, the wall— in the one patch of light from the one window, is a relief carving. At least as tall and wide as Silver, it depicts a creature that would be out of Silver’s nightmares if he could have ever imagined such a thing. It has tentacles like an octopus, and huge, horrifying wings. And eyes. Eyes that can’t glow, seeing as they’re made of stone, and yet seem to glow anyway. Seem to watch them.

He understands why Howard screamed.

“What in the Hell is that?” someone gasps.

Flint shakes his head slowly, and then peers over all their heads. “Is everyone in here? Joji— Howell—”

“Back here,” says Howell, and Flint nods.

“We have a few options.” It’s his speech voice. His motivating armies voice. “We can hope that houses near the center of the city are better supplied, and keep looking for victuals. We can try and climb higher in the city, find a way down to the beach and see if there is water there. Or we can go back the way we came, empty-handed, and hope to find another island before our supply runs out.”

The men only hesitate for a second. 

 

* * *

 

 

Five minutes later, they are all standing at the spot from where they had entered the city.

The gap in the wall that leads to the path is at least thirty feet in the air. The setting sun shines bright through it, catching them all in the only patch of warmth to be found. 

“That’s…” 

Silver can’t manage to say what _that_ is. He shouldn’t even be surprised. This city feels alive to him, in the way that storm had felt alive— wild and unmanageable, and yet somehow conscious. Summoned.

“Maybe we can reach it from the second level,” he says, even as he balks at the idea of going back into one of those buildings. “Paxton— Briden—”

The two men come back a few minutes later.

Those are the only buildings that don’t seem to have a way to climb higher.

Flint is facing the opposite direction, and Silver turns with him, looking out to the monolith. It seems to beckon them, in a way that a building cannot possibly do, and that alone is enough to make Silver want to avoid it. Why had he been curious about this city in the first place? He’s an idiot. Despite recent evidence to the contrary, he’d lived this long by avoiding things that want to kill him.

And the monolith— a tall pillar, slightly angled on all sides like the rest, going so high in the sky they thought it was a cliff from the water… if Hell had gates, that would be it. The stairs leading to the entrance look like they’d as soon let him fall as bring him safely to the top.

“It is the highest point in the city,” Flint says. “Might be our only shot at getting a look over the walls.”

It feels inevitable. 

 

* * *

 

 

Miranda and James are dead.

The world should have shifted, his life should have changed.

But they were just as dead yesterday when he had been none the wiser, and Thomas’s life changes not at all.

He sleeps. He wakes. He works. He eats. He sleeps.

Even if he was ever able to leave the plantation, he’d had no way to go looking for them without being caught. Years ago, he had accepted that he would never see them again, and yet the knowledge that they simply don’t exist anymore manages to seep its way into everything.

He wakes, and Miranda and James are dead.

He works, and Miranda and James are dead.

He eats, and—

And.

And he hates Jack and Anne, a little bit, for telling him, for telling him when there wasn’t anything more than they could do about it. Jack wanted to settle a bet with a dead man about a dead man because, what, Jack can’t let a thing go in his life? It doesn’t _matter_ what he knows about James now, because James is gone, James is disappeared somewhere in the Caribbean, and he left the aftermath of a war behind him.

(A war.)

It’s not hard to guess what made James turn against England, against society itself. And for all that it makes him sick with horror, there’s another part of Thomas that says, _at least someone remembered him._

But it doesn’t matter what he thinks about it, really.

James died and left Thomas a legacy of blood that he’ll never have to face.

Just two pirates with part of the story.

And meanwhile, through all of this—

_In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

Does it matter if he goes mad, now?

It must.

Because if James and Miranda had been the only ones to remember him, well, now he’s the only one to remember them. To remember James McGraw and Miranda Hamilton, not _Captain Flint_ and _the Barlow woman._ He will carry their names and he will carry their story. Maybe someday, he will be able to tell it. Maybe someday, someone will want to hear it.

In the meantime, he works.

He tries to smile at the proper times, but he must not be counting right, because Legrasse, one of the guards, asks him what happened with genuine concern his voice.

“Nothing at all,” Thomas says.

He sleeps.

He dreams.

He dreams of the island, the huge buildings and towers at incorrect angles.

He dreams of the sea, the same color as the sky, ripping with the potential for violence.

Sometimes, he dreams of men. A small group of them, walking. They look very small.

_In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

He wakes with a hand on his.

It takes a moment to understand that that hand is Jack’s. Is Jack holding his hand?

No.

They’ve both gone for the ink bottle at the same moment.

Thomas has a board across his knees, his Bible open to an already inked over page of Kings.

They stare at each other.

“In his house in R’lyeh,” Thomas says,

“Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” Jack finishes.

“Huh,” says Thomas.

 

* * *

 

 

“When did it start?” Thomas asks. Anne’s awake by this point as well, looking from the ink on Jack’s hands to the Bible in Thomas’s.

“The dreams?” Jack sits down next to Anne again. Puts one hand on her arm, and they love each other so much it breaks Thomas’s heart. “A little bit before we were arrested. The sleepwriting? Once, a couple weeks ago. And once now. Although I suppose I didn’t have anything to write on, for much of that time. How long has it been for you?”

That’s easy. The first few times had been on his contraband _Boston News-Letters,_ before he’d started keeping the Bible handy. He pulls the dated _Letter_ from under his mattress “Here.”

Anne takes it from him, holding it closer to their lantern. “That’s right about when—”

James died.

Maybe there’s a part of him that knew, that reacted to that loss, without ever consciously knowing that it had happened. It’s a romantic idea, but it doesn’t feel true.

“The city,” he says. “You see it too?”

“Yes.” Jack nods a few times. Anne peers at him.

“What city?”

“I thought it was nothing. I mean, I thought it all was nothing— it’s just a city. It’s weird, in the way dreams are weird— buildings that aren’t right, angles that are wrong. It’s usually cloudy.”

“And on one end?” Thomas asks.

Jack meets his eyes. “A monolith, so big it nearly reaches the clouds.”

Yes.

This isn’t possible. Thomas thinks of Old Castro again, and shudders, because there can’t be anything true about his story. “Do you see the men, too?”

“No. What men?”

“There’s a ship, by the cliffs— it looks like a cliff, but it might be a building, I don’t know. There’s a group of men, maybe fifteen or so, walking to the city.” When he pictures the group, he can do it perfectly, but only from above, or very near the ground. “I never see their faces.”

“I’ve never seen the men,” Jack says. “I just thought I was going mad.”

Thomas leans away from him. If Jack is having the dreams, then either they’re both mad or neither of them are, and he isn’t sure which is more frightening.  “We are not mad,” he says. They are not mad, but that doesn’t mean they’re seeing anything real. “ _I_ am not mad. They’re just dreams.”

“Right,” Anne says. “You two are just having the same dreams. Because that’s a thing that happens.”

“Cthulhu is not real,” Thomas says, and he pulls his blanket over his head. “Go away.” It’s petulant, as requests go, but this isn’t even Jack’s room. If he and Anne want to fuck, or go be mad together, or something of that sort, it certainly isn’t Thomas’s business.

Anne rips the blanket away from him. “You know something about this thing?”

“I know a story,” Thomas says, “that landed a man in Bethlem. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll choose to go to sleep instead.”

 

 

              


	2. The Very Sun of Heaven

_The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

Cutting sugarcane isn’t enjoyable. But there’s a balance to it, one that Thomas has gotten good at over the years. How to bend the stalk with one hand. How to swing the machete in the other so it’s cut down in one swing instead of two or three. At first, he’d tried to hold the machete in his right hand, for fear of punishments. When he’d realized that wasn’t happening, he’d become one of the fastest harvesters there.

It’s an effective use of his rage. Keeps him from taking that anger out on men who just happen to be in his way. He can pretend with each _thwick_ of his blade that he’s hobbling his father, or Peter, or that sniveling coward Hennessey, or the doctors and guards at Bethlem— all the men who have stood before him and arranged his life to this outcome, so that he even needs to know _how_ to swing a machete in the first damn place.

 _Fuck_ them. Fuck _them._

Something crunches behind him, and Thomas turns to see Jack approaching, bearing a machete of his own.

And fuck him, too.

Thomas lets go of the stalk he’s been holding, and the sharp edge of a leaf catches on his right hand. He wipes the bead of blood on his pants, bracing himself as Jack approaches.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jack says, which is not a surprise because he seems to do little else. He misses the cane on his first two swings, and it takes him four to cut through the stalk once he gets there. Thomas considers giving him advice.

“Wonderful,” he says instead. “Please go away.”

“You might not want to talk about— our situation. But with three heads together we might be able to understand what’s been happening to us, if you share what you know. Because a strange turn of events brought me here, to you, who just so happens to have a very personal connection with the man who is the crux of _my_ current state of being, and if you truly believe that is a coincidence then I ask you—”

“Is this how you stole your ships?” Thomas interrupts, cutting another stalk and resisting the temptation to go for the man’s face. “Arguing with them until they saw fit to hand themselves over?”

“Won a prize.”

“What?”

“Won a prize, not stole a ship.”

Thomas looks at the sky. It’s a mistake— the sky is too bright, so he has to look back down, blinking spots from his eyes. “Well?”

“When employed correctly, the black flag makes the argument for you. But yes, if they don’t surrender, sometimes you can argue. And then sometimes to finish the argument you need to slit the other man’s throat. It’s a very persuasive method.”

Jack doesn’t look like he’s capable of slitting another man’s throat. He’s barely capable of harvesting sugarcane. Seeming to sense his thoughts, Jack smiles.

“No, I never look like much of a threat. It’s an inconvenience at times, undoubtedly, and yet it has its uses.” When Thomas doesn’t do anything but continue his work, Jack presses forward alongside him. “Your Captain Flint— James— no one ever underestimated him.”

Damn it.

Torn between his desire to hear more about James, and his desire to never speak of him again, Thomas says nothing. Though that’s a choice in itself, he supposes, because Jack keeps talking.

“His name carried fear, of course, but by God, he was smart. He was the greatest tactician on the island, easily. The things he could make a ship do, that he could make _men_ do— you never believed he could pull it off, until there he was.”

It’s hard not to be weirdly proud of James for that, even if what he was doing was burning and pillaging. “It sounds like you tried to cross him a few times.”

“A few times. I once manipulated his crew into mutiny, rallying them behind another, horrible captain with the goal of recruiting the best of them afterward. I don’t think he ever knew it was me. But we stacked the votes, we killed the right men, and yet Flint still came back, having simultaneously disposed of the rival and fixed at least two of his other problems in the process. Of course, a few weeks later I stole five million pieces of eight he’d been chasing for months out from under him, so. You lose some, you win some.”

Five million pieces of eight. That, what, a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds? Thomas had been wealthy, had rubbed shoulders with other wealthy men— but _five million Spanish dollars_ is another realm entirely.

“What did he do, when he found out?”

A strange expression crosses Jack’s face. “We became allies,” he says, “funny enough. After some shouting. Came up with a plan to use the money to defend Nassau. Of course, when the time came, he and his crew weren’t on the island, and… it was a whole thing. He did come personally to rescue me from the clutches of the governor, though.”

“Really.”

“Well, Anne and Charles came to rescue me. Flint might have been more invested in rescuing the huge chest of gems that was traveling with me, but I like to think he saw my value too at that point.”

Thomas thinks it was probably the gems. “Touching,” he says. “Millions of dollars, chests of treasure. No wonder there were never any honest governors in Nassau.”

“You know, Flint once—”

He’s not even trying to be subtle anymore, is he. “Before you keep going,” Thomas says, “I want to be clear that we are not bonding over a man that I loved, and you could barely stand.”

Jack sighs. “Well, we could also bond over our shared dreams.”

“Or not.”

“Listen.” Jack grabs Thomas’s sleeve, and Thomas thinks about slit throats. “They have taken away my name. They have taken away my past. They have taken away my future. They’ve done the same to you. So what the hell do you have to lose?”

 _My mind. My life._ Thomas yanks his arm away. “I told you. It’s just a story.”

“I don’t believe there’s ever such thing as _just a story.”_

“Do you believe in God?”

The answer seems to take Jack aback, and he looks over his shoulder. It’s a fair reaction. Men have been killed for answering incorrectly. “I suppose,” he says.

“You cannot give any credence to the story of Cthulhu while still believing in God,” Thomas says. Every part of Castro’s story had been blasphemy on a level Thomas could hardly comprehend.  “They’re antithetical.”

Jack shoves his lips to one corner of his mouth. “It seems, in this context, that to deprive a man of something that could give his life any sort of meaning—”

“I don’t give a damn if your life has any meaning, Jack.” Thomas Hamilton had thought his life was important. Lots of men here once thought their lives were important. Henry had a well-known sculptor. When he first got here, he would work his hands in the mud every time it rained, like he could make it into clay. He’d say that someone would find him, one of his wealthy patrons or his important uncle. Thomas hadn’t told him no one was even asking about him, that the news of his death would not be doubted, that his father wanted the governorship and really Henry should have taken that into consideration _before_ he started sculpting horrific monsters eating the king. But he said nothing, and he doesn’t know if that made it better, or worse.

Henry is working a few rows away from them now, whistling a tune that just carries when the wind is right.

“Everyone comes in here like you,” Thomas continues. “Well— no, some are so grateful to be out of London’s prisons, this looks like freedom. I first came here and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen since— well, since before Bethlem, at any rate. But it’s just another prison, and if you want to drink about that I can’t stop you, but I can’t give your existence any more meaning than mine.” 

“You could,” Jack says. “Something’s happening to us, and you know more about what that is than I do.”

Thomas could tell him. He thinks he could scare the shit out of him. But Jack is not a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut, and if anyone catches word it’ll be back to sedation and cold baths.

Thomas’s life may be worthless, but if he keeps his mouth shut, it’s still his.

Jack switches tactics. “You loved Flint,” he says.

“Yes.”

“And he loved you?” It’s said dubiously enough that Thomas wants to punch him.

“Yes,” he repeats instead, because whatever happened to James since, he’d loved Thomas as fiercely and truly as Thomas had loved him. He knows that.

“Huh,” Jack says. “Hard to see him loving a coward.”

James would fight him, for that. Shortly after Bethlem, Thomas might have fought as well.

But there’s sugar cane to harvest.

“Fuck you Jack,” is all he says. “And fuck off.”

 

* * *

 

 

They walk in battle formation. Flint and Silver at the front, with Donovan and Briden behind them. Paxton and Bobby flank Dr. Howell. The other men pair off, with Dooley and Joji in the back.

Within minutes, they’re back in disarray. Donovan has bumped into a wall, Tyson stopped to see if there was glass in one of the windows, and Joji got an itch on his foot that he had to take his entire boot off to scratch. 

Flint’s face stays pointedly impassive, which means he’s about ready to do murder.

“That one’s bigger’n the rest,” Howard says, pointing at a building that’s nearly twice as wide as everything else they’ve passed. It might be taller, too, although it’s hard to say for certain. “You reckon there’s something worth having in there?”

Silver looks at Flint. Maybe when he’s not under the sky, Silver won’t have this tingling feeling of being _watched_. Flint shrugs.

“May be,” he says. “Or maybe it’s empty like the others.”

“It’s worth a look, ain’t it.” Paxton crosses his arms. “Maybe we could get at least something to show for this place.” 

They could go in, have a quick peek around. They’d been in and out of the other buildings in just a few minutes, and any find will bolster spirits. “Might as well,” Silver says, when he realizes everyone is looking at him. “If we do it quickly.” 

“Should we really be going in there?” Dooley asks. “It looks…”

He doesn’t say how it looks. 

“Well, we’ll need someone to guard the door,” Flint says. “Just in case.”

Under his look, Dooley straightens and marches inside. He doesn’t even have the torch.

“He was right, though,” Silver adds. “Paxton, Bobby? And anyone else who doesn’t want to go.” He doesn’t mean to make it a challenge, but the rest of the men file through the open door so fast that it might have been. Flint gives Silver a look, and were Silver to guess, he’d say it meant something along the lines of _be careful._

And then Flint goes inside as well, probably elbowing his way to the front of the group, and Silver has to hurry to follow Donovan.

From what he can see, the room looks like a hallway. They move down it slowly, feet skidding on the slimy floor.

“I’ve slept in fresher smelling pig pens,” Donovan says.

Silver tries to chuckle. “That sounds like a story.”

“Not much of one. I needed somewhere to sleep, and sometimes it’s pig pens.” Donovan stops, swipes one finger against the slime on the wall, and sniffs it. “Jesus, what even is this?” he sticks the finger towards Silver as though Silver can’t already smell it around them, which he absolutely can, and as though he wants Donovan’s finger in his face, which he absolutely does not.

Flint and the torch go around a corner ahead of them, and Silver swats Donovan’s hand away, trying to catch up.

And then it’s dark.

He turns, but there’s no light from the doorway behind them. And in the other direction, the torch can’t be seen. It’s only the darkness, wrapping around them. Pressing in. Silver can’t see the walls anymore, or his hands, or what he’s standing on. He keeps turning, but nothing changes. 

“What the hell?” Donovan says, from somewhere to Silver’s right. “Hullo!”

Nobody answers.

But at least Silver isn’t entirely alone.

“We must have turned a corner without realizing,” he says. “If we go back—”

He hears heavy breathing, and it takes a second to realize it’s Donovan, not him. “Which way is back, then?”

“I think it’s…” When did he turn? Silver thought he’d spun in a full circle when he realized what had happened, but had he? His false leg was pointed slightly towards the door, but how many times has he pivoted since then? “I don’t know.”

 “HEY!” Donovan shouts. It doesn’t ring against the walls, doesn’t echo. He could have been shouting into the wind from the deck of a ship for all the good it does them. Silver reaches his arms out, but he doesn’t feel a wall.  He can hear Donovan’s footsteps as the other man moves away.

Logically, they should each pick a direction and begin walking, in the hopes that one of them will find Flint and the torch to come back for the other. This building can only be so large, if they’re on one floor.

But maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re walking _up_ instead of _across_. Then it could be a long, long way back to the ground.

Silver closes his eyes. It does nothing to help him think, only shows him dancing patterns of a light that isn’t there.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright, we need to just—”

“Hang on.” Footsteps. “I think I’m walking to you. I’m— oh _fuck_ —”

There’s a scraping sound, and then a thud, and a crack.

 _Holy shit._ “Donovan!” Silver barks. “Donovan!”

Silence.

“Donovan,” he says again, starting to take a step forward. But he can’t, he can’t— “Donovan?”

Silence.

Darkness.

_Think._

Donovan had clearly fallen from something he couldn’t see. Ergo, Silver should not move in that direction lest he also fall. But which direction was it, how many pitfalls are there in this building—

What if that’s what happened to Flint, and that’s why there’s no light— maybe the torch went out under the weight of their bodies—

“Donovan,” he whispers, as though he was simply too loud before.

But Silver knows what death sounds like.

He’s alone.

Jesus, he’s alone. He hasn’t been this alone since he’d hidden in the wrecks, and even then, there had been other men around. He didn’t have to trust the men to know they were there, they didn’t have to like him for him to use them. People have been his primary weapon since he was a child, but he can’t outsmart a city that has no logic to it.

He shouldn’t have come.

He shouldn’t have left Flint’s side.

If Flint is dead, at least they’d—

No, Flint’s not dead. If getting shot and thrown overboard won’t kill him, if a hurricane won’t kill him, then an empty city can’t. What Silver needs to do is keep making noise, so that someone might find him.

He wants to scream.

He can’t. He’s a King now, or so they say, and while he wouldn’t put it past George, he doesn’t think a king is supposed to stand in the dark and scream.

“A baker in the town o’ Ayr, fal la leary,” he sings. The sound is wrong. Donovan is dead. He should sing him a dirge, at least, but he doesn’t think he could remember any dirges right now.

He should. He’s sent enough men to die. He’s pictured his own death more than once, because maybe if he imagines all possible outcomes, he can plan for them. He can avoid them. Flint isn’t the only one who can survive anything.

It’s not that he thinks he can escape forever. That Death won’t come for him like it did for Donovan— out of nowhere, like he was never anything at all. But Silver knows who he’ll be facing the end with, and that man isn’t here.

So he can’t die.

It’s not a cheerful thought.

His leg aches.

Slowly, slowly, he drags his metal leg backwards across the stone floor. There’s a bit of a slant, or what he thinks may be a slant, but there’s no edge. Somewhere there will be a wall, because he saw the wall before, and somewhere there will be a corner, because they are inside a building and they got here somehow. He will go around that corner and then he will find Flint.

“Went out to hold his weekly fair, fal la leary, his bread to sell and his flour to buy, fal la leary…”

And if he cannot find Flint, Flint will find him. They’re bound together, for better or for worse— they have been since before they even met properly. When Flint had a knife to his throat, and Silver had had his back to the wall, and he’d been thinking, _how do I survive this._ He’d known the kind of man Flint was, but he’d never met one with that kind of power. One who could make a crew of hardened sailors cower in fear. One who could turn men’s moods in an instant, rally them behind a lie as thin as paper.

Just the proximity to that power had been intoxicating. It had allowed Silver to strut through Nassau with impunity, to relish in its glow, even as he tried to distance himself from its source.

He’d known the kind of man Flint was, which is why when he’d found himself under him, he’d done his best to be memorable.

It had worked.

Until Silver had had that power for his own, and then Flint hadn’t wanted him anymore. Silver understands why, but he also understands that Flint’s logic is fundamentally flawed.

“He met the devil by the way, fal la leary.”

Madi might want him. Madi, who had also introduced herself to Silver with a sword at his throat and the threat of death.

He’s not going to die, because he’s going to tell Madi this story, and she’s not going to believe him, but it won’t matter because he’ll get to see her shake her head at him. Maybe she’ll even smile.

“O baker, o baker, what means that?”

There’s the wall.

It’s not vertical. Or perhaps the floor isn’t flat. And it’s covered in something damp and ooze-like, but it’s there. Solid. Silver leans against it for a moment, because it’s real, it’s something real in this abyss.

He picks a direction at random and starts walking, not taking his hand off the wall, inching his feet forward as slowly as he can. He thinks he’s going away from Donovan’s body, but he can’t really be sure.

“What makes your grey horse sae fat? Fal la leary…”

If the people of Nassau could see him now—  their fearsome Long John Silver, near paralyzed in darkness and singing a drinking song, they’d have a good laugh. Their laugh sounds a lot like Dufresne’s in his head, and he takes a deep breath. He is not Long John Silver. Not yet. But he is trying to become him, and he can’t do it from here. He can’t let Madi and Flint face whatever is coming alone.

“If this be true ye tell to me, fal la leary, ye’ll lay me down, and see to geld me, fal la leary.”

What the fuck is he doing, walking towards a war?

He knows better.

“The knife was sharp an’ it gaed in, fal la leary,”

And then there’s a light behind him.

“Silver!” It’s Flint, it’s Flint, and Silver sags a little with relief. He’d been walking in the wrong direction, but it doesn’t matter anymore because they found him.

And now that there’s light he can see Donovan’s body.

“Stay there.” Silver’s voice comes out confident. Good. “Donovan— I think he fell.” Of course he fell. The floor looks flat, but Donovan’s body is small, like they’re looking at it from a great distance. “I don’t know where.”

“Jesus,” Tyson says.

One hand still on the wall, Silver starts to shuffle towards them. Donovan is behind him now, but he can’t tell if there are other such drops in the floor.

“Where were you?”

“Up ahead,” Flint says. “We ended up near the top, had to find our way back down. Got a look at the city.” None of their hands are full of goods, so it’s probably safe to assume they didn’t come across anything there.

If there had been people living here, they would have left behind something. Tables or chairs or old carts, things not worth taking with them. If they’d died here, there would be bones. And yet it stands entirely empty, like it had never been built for habitation.

It doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps everything had been looted years, decades ago, by other pirates. But then wouldn’t someone have mentioned this place, this unsettling stone city? Left behind empty bottles or goods that would never sell?

“We could be dead,” Dooley says.

Silver’s foot catches in something, and he presses his hand harder against the wall.

“Come again?” he asks.

“This place.” Dooley’s voice is shaking. “It can’t be real, it don’t make no sense. Maybe we died in that fog, maybe we ran aground, maybe there was a fight and we just forgot it. This could be Purgatory.”

“Then how would Donovan have died, idiot?” Briden asks.

“Well, you don’t stay in Purgatory forever, do you?”

If they’re dead, Silver’s leg should hurt less.

“That’s enough,” Flint says. “We’re _not_ dead.” Silver’s almost to them now— Flint reaches for him, and he reaches back. Lets himself be pulled back to the group, even though the ground is still solid underneath him. “Get back outside.”

The door is only a few paces from where the men stand, but it only comes into view from a certain spot on the floor.

Silver lets his arm stay pressed against Flint’s, and doesn’t take his eyes off it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

After sugarcane has been harvested, must beaten soft.

It’s the worst.

Removing the fibers from the stalks is mind numbing, and makes Thomas’s fingers bleed, but at least it can be done in the shade. And there’s a certain level of satisfaction running them through the trapiche, twisting out the juice.

But between the fiber and the juicing, someone has to hit the harvested cane over and over with a club. It’s a sweaty task. 

_Thud. Thud._

“So do you think it’s true?” Thomas is working with Henry today. Normally he enjoys Henry’s company, but today Henry is focused on the only subject anyone can talk about. And Thomas would rather not.

“Do I think what’s true?”

_Thud. Thud._

“That she’s Anne Bonny, and he’s Jack Rackham. I mean, she’s certainly…” Henry gestures, indicating whatever Anne _certainly_ is. _Thud._ Considering his current pile limp enough, Thomas dumps it in the wheelbarrow and takes another load.

“It would make sense,” he says.

“They haven’t said anything to you? Jack sneaks out of our room all the time. Thinks we’re asleep, but he must be going to yours.”

“He is.”

Henry raises his eyebrows. Thomas raises them back. Henry sticks his chin out a little, eyebrows going higher.

“They don’t fuck in front of me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

If Thomas were an artist, he would enjoy capturing the look of embarrassed horror on Henry’s face.

“That’s— that’s not—” Henry splutters. “I didn’t think you saw, I mean, they say that Anne Bonny puts knives through the eyes of any men who look at her in a way she doesn’t like.”

Who says? “Really?”

“Yes, and they say that afterwards she crushes their balls, yanking and twisting till there’s no blood left, like sugar cane in the trapiche.”

Thomas winces, and Henry seems to take that as encouragement. “They say,” he says, leaning forward a little, “that they’re planning to escape.”

 _Thud._ Henry flinches back as Thomas whacks another cane. “Good. Then I could have my room back.”

_Thud. Thud._

There’s a mosquito buzzing around him, and he tries and fails to hit it with his next swing.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s successfully ignored Jack for two days. It’s petty, but despite what Jack had said about being underestimated, he takes being ignored worse than a slap. Thomas just exchanges greetings with Anne instead, and pulls his blanket over his face.

“—expect, sayin’ that?” Anne mutters.

“Slight miscalculation, I’ll admit,”

“Didn’t need him anyway, just,”

“…Find out from somewhere else, is all, if it matters that much to you…”

“…….nowhere else, we’ve got nowhere else, no friends, no money, no way out,”

“…that ain’t new…”

It’s easy to ignore them, let them be quiet mutterings in the background. Part of the genius of this place is that it’s damn exhausting, and doesn’t leave a lot of time for planning a rebellion. Thomas’s sleepwriting may make him crazy from lack of rest alone.

But the air around him is thick, and he breathes, and faces the now familiar angles and rock of R’lyeh. The strange group of men are stepping into it, standing together.

 _“Weapons close, but not out,”_ says one of them. They advance in close ranks, looking everywhere—

“And I’m fucking tired of it!” Jack snaps, and it’s like a shock. Thomas sits upright, hands shaking, and he doesn’t think he’s ever felt more awake in his life.

He turns to the two pirates on the other bed.

“Oh, can you hear me now?” Jack asks.

Thomas holds up a hand. He hadn’t been _present_ in the dreams, he never is, but he can always remember them afterward. And maybe it was because of where they were standing, but he had a clear view of their faces this time.

It had taken a moment to come together.

And maybe he was just—

“How long was James’s hair when you last saw him?”

“What?” Anne asks.

“How long was James— Flint’s— hair?”

“He shaved it,” she says. “Sometime, a while back, fuck if I remember.”

He’s not unrecognizable, because James will never be unrecognizable to Thomas, but it would have taken him a moment if he’d seen him from a distance. There’s no way Thomas could have just dreamed that up. Still—

“I think I saw him. In the city. In R’lyeh. He was wearing a brown shirt,” he says. And they could be lying to him, is the thing— they could be convincing him he saw James, but there’s no way for them to know if the man he saw in his dream had hair. “That last time you saw him, when he sailed away, what was he wearing?”

“Fuck if I remember what color shirt he wore,” Anne says.

“I do.” Jack frowns. “That brown shirt and that huge fucking belt that’s an atrocity to belts everywhere. I don’t think he puts guns in it, and I don’t understand how it’s supposed to hold up his pants. And then he has that black coat that goes down to his knees, with all the ornamental buttons.”

“You’re one to talk about ornamental buttons.”

Jack shoots Anne a look, but doesn’t seem to have any defense for himself. He’s wearing what they all wear at the plantation, which amounts essentially to white sacks. Thomas wonders for the first time how he prefers to dress himself.

Carefully, it seems, if he takes such notice of everyone else.

“And Long John Silver?” Thomas asks. If he saw Flint, then there is only one person the one-legged man next to him could be.

Jack crosses his arms. “You tell us.”

He’d been standing to James’s right, a little shorter, “Black hair down to here—” Thomas gestures to a few inches below his shoulders. “Mustache, beard, with a little—” he taps his thumb in the hollow under his lip, where Long John Silver had had an extra patch of hair. “Also wore a brown shirt, also had a black coat with a lot of buttons, is that common?”

“No,” Jack says. “I think they do it to make a point, but it’s fucking stupid. It’s so hot there, I don’t know how they haven’t fainted.”

Thomas doesn’t ask what point Jack thinks they’re trying to make. His mind is racing. If he saw James— if he saw James—

“There’s another man,” he says, because he can’t get too excited if there’s a chance Jack is fucking with him. “With long straight black hair. Tell me about him.”

“Asian fellow,” Jack says. “Carries a, whatcha, a katana, line of facial hair here—” he traces a line from his bottom lip to his chin. “I don’t know his name, he doesn’t talk. Your turn.”

“White man, hair kind of to here,” he waves a hand under his ears, “round face, wears a scarf.”

“That’s like, half of pirates,” Jack says. “Their surgeon, maybe.”

“None of the others were very distinctive.” Thomas tries to think. “Curly blond-ish brown hair, beard, scruffy fellow,”

“That’s the other half.”

“Fuck’s the point in quizzing each other?” Anne asks. “He’s seen Flint and Silver, and a few of the others. Wouldn’t know what clothes they were wearing otherwise. Question is, fuck’s it mean?”

Fuck’s it _mean?_

He’s been thinking, ever since he woke up— “Maybe they’re there. Maybe they’re still alive.” It’s a cautious hope, because it means that James is on an island with a sleeping monster that Thomas wouldn’t wish on anybody, but if he’s alive that means Thomas could— what, go find him?

Maybe he could.

If he could get out of here, and get money, and disguise himself, and pull off a whole host of other impossibilities.

“They’ve been gone for months,” Jack says. “Flint’s hair would have grown, at the least. Maybe they died there, and you’re seeing echoes.”

“Maybe it hasn’t been a few months, for them.” Maybe they’re seeing James’s last days, but Thomas doesn’t think so. His dreams have always felt very _current,_ in a way he can’t prove. “ _Cthulhu waits dreaming._ And time doesn’t pass correctly in dreams. You fall asleep for five minutes and it can feel like hours, you sleep for hours and you only have a minute or so of dreamtime. Maybe it’s like that.”

“You think they’re caught in Cthulhu’s dreams?” Anne asks. “Thought he was dead. _Dead_ Cthulhu, you say.”

“He is. But he can still—”

Thomas stops, hands curling into fists at his side.

He’s not going to be able to get farther if they ask questions he won’t answer, and if there’s even a possibility that James is alive, then Thomas has to go find him, has to tell him to leave, to keep him away from the monolith—

“I think,” Jack says, “you owe us a story.”

If James is alive, if James is alive, _if James is alive_ —

“It sounds mad,” Thomas says. “The man I heard it from, they locked him up for talking about it. If you say anything to anyone—”

“We’re already locked up,” Anne says. As though they couldn’t be locked up somewhere far, far worse.

Thomas’s fingernails are starting to hurt from where they dig into his palms, but he can’t seem to relax. “I heard this from a man named Castro in Bethlem Royal Hospital, but I think he believed it with his whole heart. It goes something like this—

“Before men, there was a race of… I don’t know what they were, exactly. Castro called them the Old Ones, and said they were godlike being, that came from the stars. You can imagine how the doctors liked that. He says the Old Ones built huge cities, mostly in the Caribbean and South Sea. And then they died. But they weren’t made of matter, they weren’t made of flesh and blood: so, when they died, it wasn’t really death, not like we think of it. They’re sleeping, in their houses, in their cities, preserved somehow by their priest Cthulhu, who sleeps himself. It would take an outside force when the stars are right to wake them.

“And yet— he told me they were asleep, but what he also tells me is that they could communicate through thought, that they saw all that was happening in the universe. When men first became, the Old Ones whispered to them in their dreams, telling a few men the truth, so that the Old Ones might be worshiped and men might find them. So that when the stars were right, they could be freed, and they will bring men the freedom to dance and feel and kill and destroy the world in a joyous fire.” _Joyous fire_ , that’s exactly how Old Castro had said it. Thomas had been so cold at the time, shivering in a cell, that he’d thought a joyous fire might be a decent way to die. “Before that could happen, Cthulhu’s city of R’lyeh sank, cutting off their connection of thought. So the cult continued, the belief continued, but no one has heard from the Old Ones in thousands of years. But someday, he said, the city will rise again, the dreamers will dream again, and they will be able to awaken Cthulhu, and give the Old Ones a way back to life.”

Jack and Anne both stare at him.

Anne is the first to speak. “Well, that don’t make sense,” she says. “Why’d they lock themselves in their houses in the first place, and how’d they do it if they was dead?”

Thomas raises his hands. “Why did God decide to destroy the world and everything on it, and then save every species?” Or warn against having sex, and then write an entire poem about making love. Or send Thomas away for his sins, while letting slavers and criminals grow fat and wealthy.

It’s been a long time since he had been able to understand God. Maybe that hubris had been his true sin.

Thomas Hamilton thought he knew so much.

“If R’lyeh has risen,” Jack says, “Flint and his men are wandering about it, probably looking for treasure, and if the stars are right for the city to rise then that means that a man looking for something he could sell might instead unleash— whatever Cthulhu is on the world. And maybe some other things like him.”

That sounds accurate, yes.

“We need to find them,” Thomas says. “Get them out of there.”

Jack’s eyes bulge. “You want to go there? To R’lyeh, the island of unspeakable horror that might not exist?”

If there’s even the smallest chance James is alive, Thomas thinks he’ll take the island of unspeakable horror. He knows what he’s getting into, after all. James doesn’t.

Jack and Anne aren’t going to want to. If their war is over they have no need for James. But Thomas has spent a lot of his life convincing people of things they don’t want to do. And maybe he wasn’t good at it in London, but the answer then wasn’t as obvious as it is now.

“Don’t you?” he asks. “If Cthulhu is unleashed, no one will be safe from that destruction. Certainly not us. And besides— if there’s a secret city that rises from the ocean, if the story of Creation preached by the Church is wrong, don’t you want to be one of the only men to know it? Weren’t you just yelling at me about giving your life meaning? What better way than to be the man who stops Captain Flint from ending the world?”

“Go take a piss,” Anne says. Thomas frowns, and she frowns back. “I need to talk to Jack. Go take a piss. And don’t listen ‘round the door neither.”

There’s something buzzing under Thomas’s skin as he walks outside, into the swampy air he thought he’d die in. He knows how many steps to the outhouse, he knows how many steps back, he knows the names of every man and guard here, and he’d thought he was at peace with it. He had thought he would live and he would die and that would be the end of it.

But if James is alive, and in trouble—

There’s something hurting in Thomas’s chest that hasn’t hurt in a long while. James and Miranda had scarred over, and now that’s torn open and all it does is ache. And Jack was right, earlier— what the fuck does he have to lose? Even if he dies along the way, and there are a hundred ways they could die before they get there, at least he’ll have done it outside these walls. If James is alive, then Miranda’s memory won’t even die with Thomas.

And if James is dead, if they’re all delusional and there’s nothing out there, if Thomas and Jack and Anne are left sitting in a boat while James rots away beneath the surface somewhere— he’ll have to live the rest of his life as a wanted man, without the food and shelter provided by the plantation.

But, if he finds James—

No. No, he can’t think of after, because that sounds like a dare to— to God, or the Old Ones, or whatever is out there. Perhaps they both exist together. Maybe God came after. Or maybe God created the Old Ones.

Any or all parts of Castro’s story could be wrong.

And yet.

_In his house in R’lyeh…_

Maybe this is all just madness.

Thomas doesn’t have to pee, but he gives it a shot anyway, in case someone walks by. He is not mad. He is not mad. He and Jack have both proven their dreams to each other. And while he doesn’t trust the pirate, he doesn’t see how he could have known how to describe the city, or how they could have both known details down to the shirt what Long John Silver was wearing.

“Thomas,” someone says, and he jumps.

“Legrasse.”

“Sorry,” the guard says. “Didn’t mean to startle.”

Thomas turns, trying to act like he’d just finished pissing instead of standing out here like an arse with his cock out. “It’s fine.”

Legrasse has always been nice. That’s the kicker of this place— most of the guards are _nice._ They eat with the prisoners, they make small talk, make them think they aren’t prisoners at all.

“Here, got somethin’ for ya.” Legrasse rummages in his pocket for a moment, and comes out with a tightly folded piece of paper. A _News-Letter_. Thomas smiles.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” He means it literally. “How are things with the bunkmate?”

A couple weeks ago, Thomas might have tried to angle to get her out of his room, but he can’t really do that now, can he. “I’ve had more interesting conversation partners,” he says, shrugging. “She doesn’t talk much.”

He gets a manly slap on the arm. “Sometimes that’s for the best, right?”

They share a moment of _ha ha, women,_ though Thomas doesn’t know who they’re trying to fool. Thomas is sure that Legrasse shares his condition. It had shown in the way he treated Thomas, in the beginning— first avoidance, but watching, wondering. And then the extra attention, the offerings of friendship. Thomas has braved what Legrasse would never dare, and he suffered for it, but for years he thinks Legrasse has been trying to work up the nerve to ask him if it was worth it.

He won’t, of course.

The guard values his job, and he loves his son.

But if his curiosity gets Thomas bits of news from the world, and what passes for a friend, he won’t complain.

“Have a good night,” Thomas says.

“You, too.” Legrasse moves on with his rounds, stopping next to every door and listening for noise. Anne and Jack must be keeping their voices down because he moves past Thomas’s room without comment.

Thomas approaches loudly, knocking twice on the door before going back in.

Jack and Anne jump away from each other like they had been kissing, but from the brief glimpse Thomas had it looked like they had just been holding each other.

“I couldn’t stay out there any longer,” he says. “Legrasse saw me.”

“Right,” Jack says. He reaches over and starts flipping through Thomas’s Bible, tapping a pen against his chin. “What we need, in this order, are an escape plan, money, and ships. We know that we must be able to get to the island from the area from which Flint and Silver disappeared, but if it was easy to find, we’d have ended up there as well the first time we looked. Now here’s a map of what I remember of the surrounding plantations from the trip here—” he’s drawn a crude sketch over the first page of Exodus. Thomas doesn’t know him well enough to know if he did it on purpose, but he can take a guess.

“I suppose that means we’re in business,” Thomas says.

“Yeah,” Anne says. She’s sneering slightly less than normal. “Breaking out’ll be easy enough, but the money, ships and crew are going to be a problem.”

“Breaking out will be easy?” Thomas repeats, sitting back down on his bed.

“We’ve been planning since we got here, just have to add you in. Suppose we could rob carriages on our way east towards the sea—”

“From the most feared pirates in the West Indies to common highway robbers,” Jack mutters. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

“We don’t have to, at least not to start,” Thomas realizes. “Every man that gets brought here gets brought with a sack of money. They come back from selling the sugarcane with bags of money. It goes into a safe in Oglethorpe’s office, at least for a while.”

If they take it all, will the men left behind still be fed? They’d have to, because hungry men don’t work, and this isn’t the kind of place that punishes like that.

Right?

And not all of Oglethorpe’s money is in his safe. He must have an account with some banks, or creditors.

The men will be fine.

“We’ll need weapons,” Anne says. “They took all my knives.”

There’s that mystery solved.

Jack nods. “I have a plan.”

 

* * *

 

 

They don’t get much further.

No one wants to creep around in the dark, inside or outside. They couldn’t have gotten Donovan’s body, or even recovered his food, so they drink a toast of water in his name instead.

The city still looks resolutely empty, but they set up a watch anyway. Silver can’t shake the feeling that the emptiness belies something else. That some _thing_ is here with them. Maybe not watching them like he’d first thought, but—

Waiting, maybe. Dreaming.

Silver doesn’t fall asleep.

Flint had taken the first watch, because of course he had. He’s sitting on a step that’s too large for a human foot, probably scheming about something.

Silver rolls over. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees the darkness.

Every time he shifts, he feels like he might be going over an edge. The sound of Donovan breaking— his neck? His skull? — echoes in his ears with every movement.

They’d all agreed not to sleep in any of the buildings, so they’re out in the night air. A layer of dew is going to be over them by morning, but it’s better than dark rooms and… whatever that monster had been, carved on the wall. Better than falling from solid ground.

Dr. Howell mutters something that sounds like “Zhongli mglw’nafh,” and starts to snore.

Right.

Another minute of very careful squirming, Silver gives it up as a bad job and gets to his feet. The metal leg scrapes against the stone, and he freezes. But if any of the men wake, they don’t show any sign of it.

He manages to get to Flint without falling or hitting an incorrectly angled wall. That seems about right— he’s always gone towards Flint just fine. It’s walking away from him that’s the problem.

“You might as well sleep,” he says, quiet as he thinks he can. “I don’t think I will for a while.”

“Hmm.” Flint shifts a little on the step, and Silver sits down next to him. It’s only a little more slanted than he’d expected it to be.

“Did you hear me?” He’d been barely above a whisper, but still. He’s right next to Flint now, mouth closer to his ear than it’s been in a long time.

“I heard,” Flint murmurs. “But I don’t think I…” he moves his hand, but in the darkness, Silver can’t see to where. Flexing it, maybe. Testing points in space. “I don’t think I’ll sleep. You either?” 

“No.” If there’s anyone he can say this to, it’s Flint. “At least there’s a little bit of light, out here.” It’s a sliver of a moon, at the wrong angle to the horizon. “When I close my eyes, it’s just the dark.”

“What happened to you, in there?”

Silver takes a breath. “To me? Nothing. We were trying to find a way back to you, and he fell. And then I was alone in the dark. It felt like there was nothing else in the world. I thought— I thought a lot of crazy things. I don’t even know how long I was there.”

“A few hours,” Flint says. “But distances look different here. Maybe time feels different, too.”

Or maybe Silver is just a hysterical bastard. “Maybe Dooley was right.” None of the men are going to Heaven, least of all himself, but he doesn’t think Donovan had been much worse. And yet he’d died so quickly, with no visible cause, maybe— maybe—

There’s another motion next to him, and Silver gets the sense that Flint has turned and is trying very hard to see him. “You say that like you want us to be dead.”

No, that’s Flint. Silver is dangerous because he wants to live, and Flint is dangerous because he doesn’t care if he dies. “I’ve put a lot of work into keeping you alive, Captain,” is what he says. He tries to put a smile in his voice, the memory of the thief he had been. “I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

Flint doesn’t laugh, but he does blow air sharply out of his nose in what might be humor. “Dying of mysterious causes in the middle of a fog would be a rather anticlimactic end to the story we’ve been building.”

“Well, for months now I’ve assumed I’ll die with you. This is one of the more peaceful ways.”

“How do you figure?”

That’s easy. “First, I thought you’d kill me. Then I thought the crew would kill the both of us, and then we were in cages, and then we went and started a war. Why, do you think you’ll outlive me?” Silver had almost accused him of that, six feet over a chest of treasure. Of ending Silver, or the other way around. What they have might be finite, but it’s going to break him to let go.

Flint doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “No, I imagine you outliving _me._ Whenever we finish this. Nassau will have its king and queen, in you and Madi. Captain Flint won’t have a place in that world.”

 _I thought my place was with you. I thought your place was with me._ He’s not drunk, has no excuse to say it, and so he doesn’t. “So, what, you’ll just go live as James Smith somewhere?” Silver will not contemplate the alternative, of just a body in the ground. “You can change who you are, just like that?”

“I never thought I’d have to be Flint for this long.” It’s barely a whisper, has the weight of truth, and yet it rankles at him. “I thought— I thought I could gain legitimacy for Nassau. Pardons for my crimes. I thought Miranda and I would be able to move to the interior. And then she died, and I found myself unable to imagine any future at all.”

Futures for himself, maybe. Flint has always been able to imagine futures that no other man would ever consider. Independent Nassau. A war on the British Empire itself. Freedom.

“You’re going to be Flint forever,” Silver says. “You would have been whether she lived or not. I’ve changed my name, I’ve changed my story, I’ve changed what language I spoke and where I was born, but you can’t stand over a pile of bodies, holding bloody sword, and claim it was another man who wielded it. The parts of you that you allowed yourself to act on when you became Flint— that potential was always there. Will always be there.” He hesitates.  “Billy is waiting for me to become Long John Silver. But whoever Long John Silver becomes is going to be part of who I always was, and once this war is over, me he will remain.”

“Is that what you think?”

Silver has changed himself more than Flint, of that he’s sure. “Captain Flint is a ruthless pirate. I’ve seen the man underneath that. They’re both you. And I’ve grown rather fond of you.” Maybe Silver is lying. If anyone could truly become a different man, it might be Flint. But maybe Silver wants to keep Flint from becoming someone else. Someone who won’t care about Silver, or any of the things he has convinced Silver to care about.

Or maybe he’s telling the truth. If this hypothetical James Smith caught a thief sneaking into his house, if he was goaded into a bar fight, how different would he reveal himself to be?

“So, what,” Flint says.  “I stay in Nassau? I kneel before you as one of your subjects?”

“Well, you’ve gotten on your knees for me before.”

Flint makes a choking sound. 

“I’m sorry.” He’d meant a joke, but. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you don’t—”

Flint’s breathing evens out again, and he’s barely audible when he says, “Don’t what?”

 _Want me._ But that would sound too self-pitying, to pathetic. Silver has never been pathetic. “We just don’t talk about it,” he says. “I assumed it was by design, considering the circumstances.”

“The circumstances? Why, what did you think the circumstances were?”

Silver doesn’t have a good answer for that. “What did _you_ think?”

“I assumed you were fucking me so that I’d be more likely to want to keep you as an ally, and no longer thought you needed to once you had been made Quartermaster and I didn’t have the power to dispose of you. Was I wrong?”

Yes, Silver had been pretty sure Flint knew his game. “No, that was why. And I assumed you were fucking me because you knew I’d have more to lose than you if the crew found out, which meant I’d keep my silence about it.” He hadn’t quite understood that until he’d pulled out Flint’s demons, the night before battle. Understood what that type of relationship had cost Flint before. “You also thought it might keep me from betraying you.”

“Which didn’t work,” Flint points out.

“Eh, it all worked out just fine.” Silver leans into Flint briefly, and then away, because he can’t really give friendly shoves at this angle, in this place, when the drop could be deadly.  He and Flint don’t do friendly shoves anyway. 

“We’re sitting in a cursed city with little food and little water,” Flint says. “Is this your definition of things ‘working out just fine’?”

He supposes that Flint could make the case that if Silver hadn’t schemed with Vincent and Nicholas, if Flint had been forced to put off his visit to Charles Town to get the gold, Mrs. Barlow would still be alive, and Silver would have a leg. On the other hand, he may have been in Charles Town with half as many men, and Vane’s men and the Militia would have killed the rest of them off while Flint was executed in the square.

 _At least we’re still together,_ Silver doesn’t say. Instead, “You weren’t entirely correct, though.”

“Oh?”

“About my motivations.”

Flint huffs a little. “How’s that?”

“You were right about why I started. But the reason I kept coming back was that it was so damn good.”

Flint does that snort-laugh thing again. “It was, wasn’t it.”

“Jesus Christ. And that’s when we didn’t even trust each other.”

He thinks Flint may be smiling. “Maybe that’s how it was good.”

That’s a possibility, and Silver takes a moment to consider it. Their back and forth, their need to prove themselves. But. “No,” he decides. “If we ever did it again, I think it would be even better.”

He hears Flint’s breath stop, and wonders if he’s badly miscalculated.

“Why are you saying this?”

Because he sat in the dark and faced the loss of everything he cared about. Because he wants that reassurance. Because he’s a coward, and because he feels more than he’s willing to express. “I thought that was obvious.” Silver reaches out, but Flint is sliding away from him. Not much, but enough to make his stomach hurt. “They couldn’t use it to hurt us, now. Although I suppose with my recent, um, I understand if you—”

“What, your leg? One leg or two, you’re—” Flint’s voice has gotten louder, and he stops. Silver is glad, now, that he can’t see his face. “There’s Madi.”

“I thought you and Madi didn’t like each other.” They’re always watching each other, maneuvering and talking around, and Silver isn’t so vain as to think it’s jealousy over him. “I always got the impression you disapproved.”

“No,” Flint says. “No, I… she’s smart, and she’s capable, and you two together only strengthens the cause.”

Silver has to take a second to parse that. “Wait, are you trying to sell me off into a marriage alliance?”

The notorious Captain Flint has never giggled in his life, so what he does is clearly a quiet chuckle. “No. Of course not. Although…”

Silver waits, but when nothing more is forthcoming, he takes a guess. “You like the symbolism.”

“Your relationship would have you seen as weaker, lesser, in the Empire. Here it makes you both stronger. It makes our fight stronger. And what better _fuck you_ to everything England stands for?”

“A runaway slave, and her one-legged husband?” Silver offers. “With their friend, the sodomite?”

“Technically, you’re also a sodomite.”

Sliver waves a hand. He doesn’t mean to brush Flint’s shoulder when he does it. “In truth, though. There isn’t Madi. Perhaps, someday, if we continue the course we’re on— maybe. I would like that, I think. But right now, we have offered each other nothing. We’ve promised each other nothing. And even if we did… well, you have experience in that area.”

“And they’re both dead,” Flint says. “Which you think is my fault.”

Silver shrugs. His past self really hadn’t done his present self any favors in that conversation. “Would they still be alive if they hadn’t met you?” he asks. “Perhaps. But I’ve already met you.” He’s already known him, even. Worse, he’s let Flint into his head. He was never supposed to do that. It was supposed to be the other way around— and perhaps it is. Perhaps their minds are so entangled that what their bodies so is hardly relevant.

“Try and sleep, John.” Flint says his name so gently that Silver almost doesn’t hear it as the rejection it is. “Talk to me when we’ve got a door that can lock.”

Or maybe it’s not.

Silver lies down again, still cold and alone.

 

 


	3. Any Visible Disorder

  _Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart…  was responsible for the end._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

 

Meals are always eaten together in the manor house.

They aren’t nice dinners— and the room isn’t a nice room. But it’s got one big long table, with enough seats for prisoners and guards both. They mingle and chat, and once in a while, they trade stories.

None of them are allowed to have a past, so they’re all appropriately vague: _this happened to a man I knew,_ Henry would say, telling the story of a sculptor who was obviously himself. Material would always run dry, after a while, and sometimes the guards would fill in the silence. That’s how most men on the plantation know about pirate battles and the end of the Jacobite rising.

“Tell us a story, Jack,” Thomas says, the night after they make their plan.

“Yeah,” Henry echoes. “You have to have somethin’ better than George’s tale about the woman by the lake.”

“I swear on my life, it happened,” George mutters, to a lack of response.

“I don’t know,” Jack says, looking to where Anne is seated across from him and one seat down. “Anne knows a magnificent joke.”

She stabs at a bit of meat. “The fuck I do.”

“Come on, Jack,” Legrasse says. He’s grinning.

“Alright.” Jack puts down his knife. “Here’s a story about Captain—” Thomas looks up, and Jack hesitates. “Captain Charles Vane. You all heard of him?” Everyone nods. “Well, one day he and his crew were chasing a ship down near the Spanish Main. And— ah, his Quartermaster says to him…”

What Thomas had heard about Vane was that he was brutal, that he killed men for pleasure and took joy in torturing them. Was that he was a monster that made all other pirates seem like gentlemen in comparison.

James knew Vane. Did James balk at torture, at murder? Thomas wants to think he would, but he could not have become one of the most feared pirates in the West Indies, he could not have tried to start a war, if he were the same man Thomas knew ten years past.

Thomas wonders if, when they find James, Thomas will still love him.

It’s a horrible thought. James is— James is _James._ James is the man Thomas knew better than any other, the man who knew _him._ But Thomas isn’t the same person he was in London, and James isn’t the same person he left behind.

It doesn’t matter.

Even if James is a monster many times worse over than Charles Vane, Thomas will find him. Thomas will save him, and maybe also the world, and then they will find out if they still fit together.

Jack seems to have taken a pause in the action for a bit of philosophizing, but no one has taken their eyes off him. While he and Anne have been a pain in Thomas’s arse these last few weeks, the rest of the men have only had rumors. Rumors that will grow after this display. But no one looks around as Thomas slides a knife up his shirt, wedging it between his arm and his side.

“And then they crew sailed away with the china plates,” Jack finishes, “and everyone had to tiptoe around the ship for two weeks afterward before they could sell the ruddy things, for fear of them breaking.”

“Another!” someone shouts. Thomas starts chewing on his bread again, careful not to move his right arm too much, so as not to drop it or stab himself by accident. The knife’s absence will be noted, but perhaps not for a little while.

Jack glances at him from across the table, and Thomas tries to nod without looking like he’s nodding.

“Very well,” Jack says. He tilts his head, thinking for a moment. “Who here knows how Charles Vane died?”

The prisoners all look at each other, and then back at their plates.

“Hanging,” Legrasse says eventually.

Jack nods. “Yes. But the story starts almost a year before that, with the hunt of the Urca de Lima. You see,” and he tears a piece of meat off the bone with his teeth, chewing for a long moment, “nearly five million in gold had been stolen from the Spanish by the pirates. When the British governor arrived, he was easily pressured into giving it back to them, so scared was he of the Spanish forces in Havana. But Charles Vane’s former quartermaster, now a captain himself, and another pirate, had taken their share and tried to depart the island.”

Thomas looks at Anne. He’s not the only one. Jack clears his throat before continuing. “Now the governor… somehow… managed to capture the captain and the chest of treasure, and planned on handing both over the Spanish to meet their fates. But there were many on the island, former hunters, who. How shall I say this. They had grown used to a certain type of life, of being able to have a say, a vote, in their own futures. They had been raised under the fist of the empire, press ganged onto ships, living under the tyranny of merchant and navy captains. Some of them had escaped from slavery, fleeing whips and sugar and cotton plantations for the sea, and some others had fought their way off slave ships themselves. They remembered this, and when the governor arrived, claiming a return to _law_ and _order,_ they saw more of the same in their futures. Those men got together, and they said, not here, not today. They decided to take their home back. To take their futures back.”

He’s clever. He’s clever and he’s quick and just as the guards are looking at each other, wondering if they should intervene, Jack smiles and changes tracks.

“Charles Vane was one of these men. When his old quartermaster’s companion returned with news of what had happened, he realized that not only would the money in the quartermaster’s possession be vital to their efforts, but so was the man himself. So, he, the companion, and a third fearsome pirate captain—” and he looks at Thomas, here, like Thomas hasn’t already guessed who that third man was— “And went to rescue him. They learned the route the governor, the man and the chest were to be traveling, and they stopped it. But one of the governor’s allies had guessed at what was going to happen, and sent men after the carriage as well. The pirates were hopelessly outnumbered, so they got the quartermaster and chest on horses, ready to escape.

“Vane’s horse was shot by the approaching men. But he drew his sword, staring down at least fifteen men on horseback, and he told the others to run, to save themselves, and save their fight. Alone, with nothing but a sword and an empty pistol, he took down ten of the men single-handedly. One of them shot him in the arm, but still, he stood, until the governor— who had been lying on the ground behind him, be all appearances down for the count—  got to his feet and knocked him out from behind.” He looks down again. Takes another drink. Rearranges the food on his plate.

There’s a softness to his voice, when he talks about Vane. Whether the story is true or not— by Jack’s own account, he did not see the fight— it must certainly feel true to Jack.

“And he died?” Henry whispers.

“No,” Jack says. “Not yet. They took him to a cell, the same cell the quartermaster had been in. There should have been a trial, you see. They should have brought in a judge and made a formal execution. But Vane had wounded the governor, and he lay delirious with fever. His… ally, a woman who had been powerful on the island for many years, and had a personal bias against Vane, took it upon herself to gather together the governor’s council and condemn him the very next day.”

No one is even chewing anymore. Thomas is glad he got the knife earlier, because every rustle of fabric is audible in the pause.

“Outraged, some pirates went to the square where the hanging was to take place, ready to fight and die, to fight not only for Vane’s freedom, but against the miscarriage of justice everyone could see occurring. Charles Vane committed crimes against the crown, he’d be the first to admit that— but he was denied his right to a judge, a jury, and a proper trial. And he knew this. He knew that everyone could see that, so he sought out the pirates in the crowd, and he signaled to them to stand down. To allow the governor’s mockery of a law to be carried out. To expose him, and to rally others to the cause of freedom.”

“Jack.” Oglethorpe himself is now standing in the corner of the room, arms crossed.

Jack blinks at him, a show of forgetting he’d had an audience. Thomas hadn’t heard Oglethorpe come in, but he can’t imagine Jack and Anne missed him.

“Anyway,” Jack says. “That’s just what I heard happened.”

 

* * *

 

 

“He shouldn’t have done that,” Thomas says to Anne when they’re back in their room. “They’re going to be watching him more closely now.”

“You told him to keep going!”

“I didn’t mean a story like _that.”_

Anne shrugs. “You got the knife, right?”

He pulls it out of his armpit and hands it over, watching as she taps it against her palm a few times. Tests its bend, the handle, the sharpness against a piece of straw pulled from her mattress. Her assessment: “this is shit.”

“Well, we’ll also have the machetes,” Thomas says. His room had never been large, but since its number of occupants has effectively tripled, it’s been stifling. He takes a breath and imagines the next few weeks on a ship. That will likely be worse.

“The other day Jack tells me at length about how he takes advantage of being underestimated, and then he went and shared pirate propaganda in front of the guards and Oglethorpe.”

Anne looks up at him, once, then back down at the knife. She’s still shaving off bits of a straw, but for what purpose Thomas can’t tell. Absently, she reaches one hand up to her head like she was going to adjust a hat, and then she stops.

“Oh,” Thomas realizes. “That’s the first time he’s been the most legendary man in the room, isn’t it.” Most legendary _man._ Stories of Anne Bonny may be wider spread than Calico Jack Rackham, if only for her novelty. As a fascination and a horror to good men and women everywhere, who love imagining the depravity in which she lives. How her kills were, by nature, more ruthless than a man’s. For any man can kill another, but for a woman to do murder? There must be something extra broken within her. If Anne wanted, she could likely inspire men to do all sorts of horrible things with her name alone.

“He was trying to think like Flint,” she says.

“Come again?”

“Flint.” Anne shears a straw in half down the long side. “If Flint was here, he’d have probably incited these men to a revolt within a week.”

“In a week?” Thomas thinks of the slow complacency he’s been seeing for years. “That seems ambitious.”

“He _is_ fucking ambitious. Story goes he got captured by a bunch of maroons, and when they were going to kill him, he instead convinced them to fight to retake Nassau with him. Jack thinks to find Flint, you gotta think like Flint.”

Thomas can’t imagine James doing that.

Jesus, did he even know him?

Maybe he did truly become someone else. 

“That’s great. Except instead of a revolt, we’re just going to have more people watching us.”

“Maybe.” Anne starts flipping through Thomas’s Bible, to the page Jack had drawn the map on. “You sure you don’t know of anything outside here?”

“You’ve seen it more recently than I. We must be far back from the road, because no one ever stops here, and there are likely other plantations in the area, but beyond that I couldn’t say.”

“We passed one, maybe a few miles back.” Anne taps a dot Jack had made. “Can’t say how big it is. Probably guarded.”

“The question is, how committed is Oglethorpe to secrecy?” Thomas muses. “If he puts out that three of his workers have escaped, they won’t be looking for a white woman. Perhaps we could be indentured servants fleeing a contract, but the fact remains that to have people looking for us is going to bring him attention. And if word spreads to his clientele that it’s possible to escape from this place, they’re going to get nervous. Now, me, I don’t have anyone left to care.” Technically he has a half-brother who inherited his title, but that hardly matters at this point. “And nobody knows you two are even here. We might not be worth making a fuss over.”

“But he might be afraid we’ll talk. Tell people where we were.”

“Yes, I’m not saying we won’t be pursued. But it might just be by Oglethorpe’s men, instead of the entire area.”

The door creaks open and Jack ducks in, closing it carefully behind him. “Hullo.”

Thomas bites down on his cheek to keep from asking Jack what the hell he thought he was doing, instead just watching as Jack sits down next to Anne and frowns at his own rudimentary map.

“Planning?”

“I’m wondering how to get a ship,” Thomas says. “I doubt Oglethorpe has enough money to pay an entire crew to take us to the Caribbean, unless you want them to drop us off on Jamaica. We can sail around looking for R’lyeh in a skiff.”

“Yes, that would be fun.” Jack is frowning. “If only we had the…”

Thomas waits to see if he’s going to finish the thought, but he doesn’t. “If only you had what?”

“Nothing. We can’t get to it anyway, from here. But—”

“Hang on,” Anne says. “You’re talkin’ ‘bout the—”

“Yeah.”

“The _what?_ ” Thomas hisses. If they would stop speaking in half-sentences around him, maybe they could get a lot farther in their plans.

“Ah,”

“Just tell him,” Anne says. “Gonna need it eventually.”

Jack clears his throat. “I am one of three men alive who knows the location of that chest of gems I discussed earlier. The other two men are currently stuck on the island we’re trying to reach.”

Ah.

“Unfortunately,” he continues, “Even if I could convince people I was good for the money, I can’t exactly charter a ship to that location, so—”

“So we find someone who already knows that island, and knows you know where the cache is,” Anne cuts in.

“Who— wait, are you serious?”

“Wouldn’t hurt to have his fleet, neither.”

“He won’t help us. He doesn’t like me.”

Anne sighs. “Lots of people don’t like us, Jack. They still like money.”

“And when we get back Flint and Silver alive, and tell them the cost of that assistance?”

“Well I’m not saying we promise him all of it.”

“Who?” Thomas can’t shout, but he wants to.

Jack is now the one who sighs. “Edward Teach. Blackbeard.”

Blackbeard. _Blackbeard._ Blackbeard is a man that Jack knows, who knows Jack well enough to personally dislike him. Jesus. James probably knows Blackbeard.

Thomas might meet Blackbeard.

“Oh,” he says. 

 

* * *

 

 

Silver wakes to yelling.

He grabs his gun, draws it, sits up— _they’ve finally found people they’ve finally been discovered_ — but all he sees are Tyson and Howard, hands around each other’s necks. Howard has Tyson nearly horizontal on what should be a vertical wall, and Silver’s first thought is that maybe it’s a good thing Flint didn’t take him up on anything last night, because this city is _not_ a safe place to fuck. Then he processes what he’s looking at.

“What the fuck,” Silver demands. He hates getting up from lying on the ground— He has to roll forward, metal leg stuck out like it’s broken, and balance on his good one until he can get the metal leg under him. It’s a teetery dance and while he’s gotten rather good at it, it doesn’t inspire those who look at him. He tries to make up for it in his voice instead. “What the fuck is going on here?” 

“He was stealing my food!” Howard yells, managing to get an elbow in Tyson’s face.

Tyson shouts what might have been “Liar!”, but it’s hard to tell, because he’s got his few teeth around the elbow and is biting down.

Everyone else is half-awake, bemused. Sighing, Silver makes eye contact with Joji, nodding his head at the scuffling pair. Stifling a yawn, Joji gets up, separating them with almost laughable ease. 

“You son of a cheap whore—” Tyson spits—

“Quiet.”

They both shut up, and it’s been a long time since Silver got a thrill from this, from having his order obeyed that quickly, but he gets one now. The two men stand on either side of Joji, looking furious and yet somehow abashed at the same time.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen the problem coming. They’d all carried a day’s worth of food. If they’re here longer than that, and continue to find nothing but stone, the fighting is going to get worse. He tries not to think of two men on their knees, staring down Flint’s gun.

“We have survived the Doldrums together,” Silver says. “We have survived imprisonment together. We have survived battles and storms and the Navy and we are not going to turn on each other over a day of low rations, do you understand me?” They’re all listening to him, at any rate. He catches Flint’s eye, but Flint’s watching just like the rest, leaning forward on his elbows from the step he’s still sitting on. Was he there all night? Silver turns away. “This city may be cursed. This city may have been made by something evil. But it’s just a city. It is stone and empty buildings.” Empty buildings that killed Donovan, but he can’t allow that to fester. “We are going to walk through it, we are going to get back to the ship, and _none of us_ —” he turns slowly, both for flair and to make sure everyone is paying attention, “none of us are going to go back on the _Walrus,_ to our brothers, and have to explain why we betrayed each other. That we were so cowardly.” He finishes his turn, meeting Howard’s eyes, and then Tyson. “Does everyone understand?”

Nods all around.

“Good,” he says. Flint’s giving him a look, so he smiles. “Captain?”

Flint steps forward. Maybe he’s looking at Silver differently this morning. It’s hard to tell.

“We have two choices going forward,” Flint says. “Our goal is the platform on the monolith. As demonstrated, we don’t have enough food to stretch this out. And the buildings are dangerous, sometimes deadly, and can trap us into delays. We can either keep searching every building we pass for food and valuables, slowing us down. Or we decide there is nothing here to be found, and we find a way out as quickly as possible. Those in favor of searching?”

“Aye,” say Paxton and Bobby.

“And in favor of making our way as quickly as possible?

“Aye!” shouts everyone else. Joji raises his hand.

Silver is inclined to agree with the latter group. The large building he’d been trapped in isn’t too far behind them, and he’s not eager to repeat the experience.

“We’ll head towards the monolith,” Flint says. “From the look we got yesterday, we’ll have to take the stairs to get there.” He gestures at the staircases linking the buildings. “If we start the climb early, we may be able to get over the wall before we reach it. I’m sure the stairs are more dangerous than they look. We’re going to move slowly, and carefully.” He stops talking, but the men don’t stop watching him.

“So eat now,” Silver says. He takes a strip of meat from his own bag and begins to chew.

The sight of the stairs makes his leg hurt.

 

* * *

 

Thomas waits for Legrasse to catch him at the outhouse again.

“Fancy meeting you here.” Legrasse is smiling, and Thomas gives him a careful smile in return.

“Thank God,” he says. “Jack’s snuck in to, ah… would you mind just sticking your head in, frightening them off? I don’t dare do it myself.”

“They’re…?” He’s got the same half-horrified, half-curious look Henry had. Thomas has had some very creative sexual experiences in his life, but even he is having trouble figuring out what people think Jack and Anne are up to, to get that expression on their faces.

“Yes,” Thomas says.

The guard smiles. His normal, friendly smile. He’s always had power over Thomas, over all of them, but he’s never used it for ill, never acted like an overseer or a Bethlem doctor. He’s a friend, and that’s more than enough to make Thomas regret the trouble he’s going to land him in.

“Alright,” Legrasse says. “I’ll just knock on the door, say I heard something, won’t say you were the one that told me.”

“Thank you so much.” Thomas taps his nose and smiles back.

Legrasse turns and walks up to Thomas and Anne’s door. When he’s sure he isn’t looking, Thomas creeps carefully after him.

He’ll be able to hear the grunts and thumping from outside, if Jack and Anne had held up their end of the deal. They’d both looked like they were going to off Thomas themselves when he proposed it, but he knows the guards best, he knows the patterns best. He knows that in a second, Legrasse is going to—

Knock on the door once before opening it with a loud, “ _Excuse_ me!” Not expecting Thomas coming up behind him and giving him a hard shove, throwing him onto his elbows.

Then Jack is there with a hand over Legrasse’s mouth, and Anne has the stolen knife at his throat.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas mutters, closing the door. He brings the lantern closer, both so that they’ll be able to see what they’re doing, and so that Legrasse will be able to be properly in fear of the two pirates standing over him.

Legrasse’s wide eyes meet his.

Thomas tosses Jack the strips he’d made of his blanket. 

Jack looks at them, and then at Anne, and then Legrasse, and Thomas sees his suggestion before he says it.

“We’re not killing him.” He can’t get between Anne’s knife and Legrasse’s neck, he can’t stop them if they try. Legrasse makes a squeak of fear, and by the smell of it, pees his pants. Thomas takes a deep breath. “That wasn’t the plan.”

“That wasn’t _your_ plan,” Anne says. “We let him live, he’s going to squeal on us.”

“They were always going to find out anyway.”

“But we’d have more of a head start.”

“No.” No, he can’t stomach that. They are pirates, and killers, but Thomas isn’t. “You kill him, and I’ll scream.”

“You scream, I’ll kill you,” Jack says.

This is Captain Rackham, but it’s still Jack, the self-aggrandizing annoyance who has been sneaking into Thomas’s room for the last month. “And how do you think Captain Flint will react to that?” Legrasse grunts at the name, but Thomas can’t look at him again.

“We don’t have to mention you.”

Like he could go that long with that private knowledge about Flint and not share it. “You think you can even find the island without me?”

Jack’s lip curls, and he takes a breath, but Anne beats him to it.

“We ain’t killing Thomas,” she says.

“And _you_ aren’t killing Legrasse.” He meets Anne’s eyes, and it’s maybe the first time they’ve had more than a second of eye contact. She nods.

“Tie him up.”

“Since when do you go for the peaceful option,” Jack mutters, but he starts binding Legrasse’s wrists behind his back. “Jesus Christ. If we get caught because of this, you’ll never see him again.”

Thomas wants to say that James wouldn’t have wanted Thomas to kill men getting back to him, but he doesn’t think there was ever a point where that was true, even in London.

“We won’t get caught,” he says, as Jack moves on to the feet. “At least, not because of him. Because he knows if he tries to raise the alarm before they come looking for us in the morning, it’ll put a target on his back. Safer to just lie here and wait. No one could blame him for that.”

“Fine,” Jack says. “Fine!” He stuffs the remaining blanket into Legrasse’s mouth. “Let’s just put him on the bed, too, while we’re at it. Make him more comfortable.”

Thomas gives Jack his most professional, lordly smile. “An excellent idea.”

“Fuck you, Thomas.”

They hoist a well-trussed Legrasse onto Thomas’s bed, and Jack and Anne head for the door.

“I really am sorry,” Thomas says quietly. “But this is important.” For many reasons. If Cthulhu is freed, who’s to stop him from destroying Savannah as well?

Legrasse grunts again, and Thomas pats him on the shoulder before unhooking the keys from his belt.

Night on the plantation has never felt so dark with the moon so bright. He feels like he can see no one, but everyone can see him, stealing through the shadows towards the tool shed. A few months earlier or later and they would have had bugs screeching to cover their retreat. Thomas never thought he’d miss those bugs.

He carefully tries each key, very aware of Jack and Anne at his back. They’re there to keep watch, but if anyone comes upon them, all they have is one knife. The alarm will be raised before they’ll be able to stop it.

When he finds the right key, the lock clanks, louder in the night than it is in the morning. He freezes, but Anne shoves the door open.

“If they heard that, we gotta hurry,” she mutters.

They close the door behind them, leaving them in pitch darkness for a moment before Jack lights the lantern. Thomas doesn’t need it— he’s been getting tools out and putting them away here for years. He tries to think of them as weapons he’d use against a person. To maim. To kill.

He isn’t sure if he’s going to be able to do that.

“Here.” Anne hands him a machete. “Heard you’re good with one of these.”

“For cutting sugarcane,” Thomas mutters, even as he takes it. It’s the one with the dent in the handle. “Not arms.”

“That’s the life.” Jack takes another machete, and then one of the clubs they use for softening the cane. He weighs both in his hand for a moment before he takes the club. “If a guard comes at us, we have to stop them. You do understand that, right?”

“Yes.” In theory. “I’ve just known these men for years.”

“That’s the life,” Jack repeats. “They’re your allies, they’re your enemies, and once they’re your enemies it doesn’t matter if you were once friends. Not if you want to survive.”

Yes, Jack had threatened to kill Thomas not half an hour ago. He won’t forget that very quickly.

“Let’s go,” Anne says. Then— “are you taking the club?”

“Yes, if they come at us with swords and I can get enough power in the swing—”

“Fast enough and the sword’ll break that in half.”

“A machete isn’t going to do a whole lot better. Toss me one of those sacks, will you? We’ll want something to carry everything in.”

Or it’s because Jack isn’t quite as good with the machete, but Thomas isn’t going to chime in. Anne huffs something, but takes a machete of her own. “C’mon.”

Either the lock hadn’t woken anyone, or they’re hiding very, very well, because there isn’t an ambush waiting outside. They don’t lock the door— by the time someone notices, they’ll have to be long gone— but instead walk around the back side of the prisoner quarters to the manor house.

If the other prisoners want to steal some tools— weapons— they’ll have the perfect opportunity to do so and blame it on the escapees. If they do, Thomas will never know, because he’s never going to see any of these men again. He’ll think about that more when they’re safe.

He’s tempted to suggest that Jack be the one to test the keys, since Thomas is more proficient with the machete, but he doesn’t.

The kitchen door opens for them, and they shuffle inside. “Food,” Anne says, opening the larder. “Jack, bring me the bag.”

“Well don’t put food in their now, or it’ll get crushed by the money.”

“That’s optimistic,” Thomas says. Anne huffs, snatches the bag anyway and starts dumping hard-cooked bread and dried meat into it. The door creaks when it’s closed, and they all freeze, but no one moves in the house.

There should only be about five people sleeping here, but that doesn’t mean more won’t come.

Being the only one to have been to the office in question, Thomas takes the lead. The halls aren’t as ornately decorated as Thomas and Miranda’s had been back in London, but they’re far grander than anything Thomas has seen since. Paintings and carefully carved furniture dot the way. The only light they have is the moonlight through the windows, turning everything into smudges in the dark.

He’s half tempted to ask Jack to light the lantern again, but that will be more dangerous than anything else.

Still, in the dark, he tries two wrong rooms before the office. One of them looks like a library, and he’d never known there was a library here and it’s infuriating. He’s walked past this door before— they could have let him read more than the Bible the whole time. But read men get ideas.

He wants to steal a few on principle to take for the road, but his Bible, pen and ink are already taking up all his pocket space, and he doesn’t think they’d fare well in the sack with the food and— hopefully— money.

The office they’re looking for is behind the third door. Thomas tiptoes around the desk to close the shutters, and only then do they risk a light.

“I think the safe is on the bottom shelf,” Thomas says, crouching on the floor. Something about the motion makes his back twinge, and he tries not to wince. Things ache, working here. He hasn’t been thinking about that and going on the run, but there’s a lot of things he’s working on not thinking about.

“How often have you been in here?” Jack asks, putting the lantern on the floor so he can search as well. Anne stands just behind the door, machete in one hand and kitchen knife in the other.

“Only a few times.” When he had first been brought here, he’d been important enough to warrant a meeting. He’d seen the money that had come with him— like a fucked-up sort of dowry, he’d thought hysterically at the time— disappear into the safe. They’d brought him on a couple other occasions, as one of the most eloquent and gentlemanly prisoners, to convince frazzled families that their sons would be well treated here.

Thomas hadn’t told them about his aching backs, or the exhaustion, or the quiet isolation. The new men had come, abandoned and enraged, and Thomas had wondered whether he’d been responsible for sealing their fate. But that was ridiculous, really. If they hadn’t been here, they’d be dead or in jail.

“Ha!” The chest had blended into the shadows, but they’re able to slide it forward. It’s too big to carry with them, and Thomas fiddles with the lock. “Don’t think any of Legrasse’s keys are going to open it.”

“Not likely.” Jack carefully works his machete in the crack between box and lid, rocking it this way and that. It doesn’t budge. “Hmm.”

“How do you usually open these things?” Thomas asks.

“Well, usually, you tell the captain you’re going to kill him if he doesn’t open it.”

Of course. “And if the captain had already died?”

“Axe. Loud smash.”

“Here. Watch the door.” Anne elbows her way in between them and pulls out the knife, sticking the tip into the lock and gently rocking it.

Five minutes later, nothing has happened.

Thomas feels like he’s aged another ten years.

The edges of the chest are lined with metal, which means he can’t simply slice it open with a machete.

“We could burn it?” he suggests. “Just like, a little.”

Jack tilts his head. “Of course, if all the money is in cloth bags, then we’ll have a lot of very hot coins and no way to carry them.”

“That’s why we’d only burn it a _little_ —”

The trunk pops open. Anne does that sneering thing again. Thomas had thought their relationship was past that face, but perhaps not.

He can just make out the bags of money in the candlelight. Most of them look like coins, but there is a roll of paper notes as well, in pounds and shillings. A few bills of exchange that will be functionally useless to them.

“Can we even carry all of this?” Thomas asks.

Anne grabs the paper notes and sticks them in her pocket. It doesn’t seem secure, but Thomas isn’t going to question her on it. Instead he reaches for one of the heavier bags and pulls out a coin. “Pounds,” he says.

Jack lays another bag to the side. “Pesos. Not worth it if we can have pounds. Does he have any gems?” he starts rummaging through the bags again. Thomas can guess at what kind of world Jack comes from, but it’s hard to imagine anyone ever buying anything in _gems_ , and just storing them in their office.

“Small change, small change, small change,”

“We might want small change,” Anne says. “Payin’ will look less suspicious.”

“Yes, alright.”

The coins are probably separated by amount, and they clink when they’re moved. The pirates have more experience quickly identifying currency than Thomas, so he takes up a place at the door, machete out.

Part of him wants to pray no one approaches, but it doesn’t seem like the type of favor that he should be asking of God. 

And he doesn’t know who might be listening.

Of course, if Cthulhu can influence dreams and read minds, if he knows what Thomas, Jack and Anne are trying to do, he could wake everyone in the compound up from a nightmare at this moment.

_Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

The phrase is still calming. Still _right._ Thomas stares past the door, into the dark hallway, and whispers, “in his house in R’lyeh…”

“Hmm?”

He glances back to Anne. “Nothing.”

Jack slings the bag over his shoulder, grunting a bit.

“For fuck’s sake.” Anne snatches it from him. They’ve left the pesos in the chest, but it looks like they’ve tried to carry everything else.

Well, they may need it later. 

They leave the office door open behind them, slipping back into the hall.

“Just have to get to the gate, and we’re…” Jack trails off as they come around the corner.

Oglethorpe is standing there, blinking in his night clothes, holding a pistol. He raises it at the sight of them.

“What,” he asks, with a lot of dignity for a man in only his pants, “do you think you are doing? _Thomas?_ ”

Thomas doesn’t lower his machete.

“We’re robbing you,” Jack says. “Although, since a good bit of this money was your payment for taking us in, and since we’re leaving, this is more of a…. canceled sale. Not to mention that we helped the woman who paid you earn that money, so that gives us twice the claim on it you have, if you think about it that way.”

Anne doesn’t stop moving as he talks. She swings the bag around, letting it slam into Oglethorpe’s knee— Thomas flinches away, but the pistol falls to the floor without going off. She forces Oglethorpe to his knees, knife at his throat.

“You should have stayed in bed,” Jack continues. “We really didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Thomas,” Oglethorpe says again. “What—  are they putting you up to this?”

“I’m sorry.” Thomas should really stop apologizing to men who essentially enslaved him, but he was raised too well not to. “Someone important to me is in trouble, and I have to go. Please let us.”

“Thomas,” Anne says. “If he alerted anyone, we ain’t got time to tie him up.”

“Please—” Oglethorpe splutters. “We saved you. If you do this, they’ll end this place, they’ll send all these men to prisons or worse—”

Jack shoulders his club. “I’m sure your heirs will see it differently, and simply stop accepting pirates.”

“Please—”

Oglethorpe’s not wrong. He’s not wrong but Anne was right, and they’ve spent too much time here as it is. Thomas looks away.

Something damp hits his knee, and there’s a thud. And he can’t look down, can’t see the body of the first man in years to offer him any sort of kindness, no matter the intention, splayed out on the floor, so he looks at the gun instead. Picks it up.

He doesn’t know how to fire a pistol.

The ceiling creaks. Someone’s moving upstairs.

And then they run.

 

 

 


	4. Hellish Outlines of a Nameless Monstrosity

_Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu"_

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

Tyson and Howard’s fight doesn’t leave his mind as quickly as it should have.

It should be nothing. Pirates fought. Men fought. Women fought. That’s just human nature. Silver has been trying to avoid or control those fights since he was a child.

But were Tyson and Howard right?

Silver has about one and a quarter jars of water, a bit of hardtack, and five strips of meat. He’s been sucking on some of the hardtack for at least half an hour now. He’s going to be fine.

And yet he looks ahead at Flint’s pockets, and his fingers itch with the urge to slip a piece of meat out. Just in case.

It’s an instinct he’d thought he’d suppressed.

He stares at Flint’s arse instead.

The stairs, he tells himself, are fine. He’s by far the slowest of the group, and maybe they should all go ahead of him, but he doesn’t want to be left alone. Doesn’t want to know what trouble they’ll get into. And walking slowly will keep them from tiring too fast, from getting a sweat and freezing at night, from getting too hungry. Or so he tells himself, as he walks second in line.

His stump burns.

There are regular landings, not too far apart— at balconies and doorways. The stairs themselves are wide enough for two men, but they have no railings and are at such odd angles that they don’t dare walk anything but single-file.

The ground is—

It’s hard to tell how far the ground is. 

It’s hard to tell how far they have left to go.

Some of the stairs come up to his knee, and Silver glares down at them like a look will help anything. “Whoever built this,” he says, trying to not sound like he’s panting for air, “they must have been as big as giants.”

Flint looks back at him, raising his eyebrows, as though Silver meant the size was the only problem with these stairs. “Maybe that’s what they were.” He offers Silver a hand, but Silver shakes his head, instead pushing himself onto the next stair with his arms.

“Giants?” Silver repeats. For a moment, he can hear his mother’s voice in his head, and he brushes the memory off. “That would make this place older than Noah.”

“The Ancient Greeks believed in a race of giants, too. They were buried under mountains before humanity was created.”

Older than Noah, older than _man_. That’s such a stretch of time that Silver can hardly fathom it. He can’t imagine it’s gone undisturbed and undiscovered all this time.

But there are no rotting ships, no bones to suggest generations of men have died here. Perhaps the ones who saw it were all too frightened by the experience to say anything to anyone. Or perhaps Silver’s feeling of another presence isn’t imagined at all: perhaps there is something conscious in this city, and it chose to lure them in.

Or perhaps it was nothing but a great navigational error that left them sailing in a direction they had no business sailing. Perhaps they’re the first men to ever see this place.

The thought is as horrifying as it is thrilling.

The next step puts him at an odd angle, making the men behind him look like they’re walking sideways, and Silver bangs his knee on a stone edge. It sends a jolt down to his toes.

“I have a new plan,” he says. “We lure what remains of Rogers’s forces here, and we don’t even fight them. We just sail away and leave them to stumble around forever.”

“I don’t think they’ll fall for lure again,” Flint says, but his mouth is twitching like he’s also imagining the honorable governor falling on his face. “Although I suppose one shouldn’t underestimate what pride can drive a man to do.” He looks hard at Silver.

Silver’s pride isn’t something foolish. Silver’s pride is what makes him look strong in front of his men. Keeps this thing they’ve started moving forward.

He’s about to make that point when someone screams.

Behind them, Dr. Howell is clutching the side of the steps. His legs are swinging in the air, kicking against nothing. Joji kneels and grabs his wrist, trying to pull him back up, but the step seems slanted downward. If it is, then they could both fall. 

That can’t happen.

It’s not just that surgeons are rarer than jewels, although that’s true. But for all Silver and Howell’s relationship is one of good advice going ignored, Silver can’t—

He can’t lose another one.

Losing Joji is also not an option.

Flint makes like he’s going to move, but Silver beats him to it, hopping carefully down the stairs. The men look right-side up again from down here, and Silver tries not to think about how much it’s going to hurt going back up. There’s not much space for the men to get out of his way, so he has to stop a couple steps above Howell and Joji.

Dooley’s got a hand on Joji’s arm as well, now.

One slip and all three of them would fall.

“I can’t—” Howell says.

Silver looks past him, down at the ledge below. It could be ten feet. It could be thirty. In the back of his mind, he hears Donovan’s bones break. 

“Does anyone have something we can throw over the side?”

“Here.” Someone hands him an empty pouch, and Silver drops it.

It lands almost immediately, still looking about the right size, so Silver takes a breath.

“Howell,” he says, carefully. “There’s a ledge below us, not too far. Can you let go and land without breaking anything?”

“I—” Howell splutters. “I— I don’t—”

“We’ll wait for you.” If Howell breaks any bones they’ll have to go back for him, and that’ll give them another half day at least, but if he doesn’t, it won’t take him as much time to reach them as it took them to get here. He won’t have Silver slowing him down.

They don’t get a chance to find out if Howell thinks he can do it. His fingers slip, and Joji pitches forward. Dooley yells— but Joji has already let go of Howell’s arm, sitting up with a sick expression on his face.

Howell lands with a thud.

There’s no crack, no scream.

The men are dead silent. Silver looks back at Flint, still on the landing— he’s got his hand on his sword, like he expects a fight to break out.

“I’m alright!” Howell shouts. “It was only twice as high as I am!”

Thank God. Silver lets out a breath, and claps Joji on the shoulder. “We’ll wait for you!” he calls back.

“I think I see a way up, I shouldn’t be long.”

“Rest up, then.” Silver climbs back up to the landing, trying to act like he’d known it would be a short drop the whole time. “We need a break anyway.”

 

* * *

 

 

They must look ghostly in their approach. Blood on their white clothes, half glowing in the moonlight. Dead things, running back towards life. Storming the gate.

Is this how Orpheus felt?

They can’t risk stopping for the horses they’d planned to steal, and Thomas can only hope that they’ll be able to disappear into the brush somewhere before any guards can mount a pursuit. The one man on gate duty backs away from them, hands up, spluttering— and Jack’s club connects with his head before he can defend himself.

Thomas’s hands are shaking.

“Keys,” he says, and Jack grabs them off the fallen guard, tossing them over. Thomas unlocks the wide double-gate, and steps through them for the first time in years. A path of destruction behind him, a fragile world ahead.

They’re free.

Anne reaches her hand through the bars to lock the gate again from the inside. There are other keys, but someone will have to send for them. It may slow them down.

They can’t hear any signs of alarm. But they’d left Oglethorpe out in the hall, and now there's this guard, whose name Thomas doesn’t know. Someone will find them soon enough.

The guard might live. Oglethorpe certainly won’t.

Thomas had looked away and let them—

No. No, they have to run. They have to get off the road, where their light clothing makes them easy to see. It doesn’t matter what they’ve left behind. Who they’ve said goodbye to and who they haven’t.

“We want to go east,” Jack says.

Thomas looks at the sky, but Anne’s already hurried off to the left, so Thomas follows. The road here is just two smooth grooves from wagon wheels: Thomas walks in one, and Jack and Anne in another. The brush on either side is dense, but too low to hide in.

Exhaustion is creeping up on him. Awake all day beating sugar cane, and all night running. Walking. He hasn’t walked any distance… ever, probably, and though his arms and legs are stronger from farm work than they ever were in London, aches and injuries come with it.

A mile or two of tense silence later, the road turns against what looks like the border of another cane field. This one isn’t walled away, and must be far larger than Oglethorpe’s. Thomas wonders for a second if they could disappear inside it, walk between the rows— but that won’t give them anywhere to run but towards a plantation run by men far more sympathetic to Oglethorpe than they will be to Thomas, Anne and Jack.

They go around the edges instead.

The longer they stay on this road, the more Thomas’s back itches, like someone is following them. And they might be, already. There’s only two directions they could have run, and there are enough guards on the plantation to split up the search.

The sky isn’t getting lighter, but the stars have moved a good bit before Anne throws out a hand, stopping them in their tracks. “Do you hear that?”

Thomas hears the wind, and a few frogs. He can’t imagine either of those things are what she meant. She tilts her head, then gestures across the road in the opposite direction from the cane field. “This way.”

That way lies more of the thick brush, and they won’t be able to run if they’re caught out here. But it’s off the road, and it looks like the hill slopes down a bit, and even though he’s getting the sense that Jack and Anne aren’t as experienced in evasion on foot as they might be on water, they’re still better at it than he is.

“You two could clear a path with those machetes,” Jack suggests.

He knows as well as they do that that’ll just lead the guards to them, but it’s a fun thought to entertain. Thomas kicks his way through the brambles, trying not to leave too obvious a trail. Did James and Miranda had ever had to do anything like this?

He can’t see Miranda having to tromp through the undergrowth. The plants would all have the sense to politely get out of her way.

Anne doesn’t tell them what she was listening for, but Thomas hears it after a few minutes.

Water.

They come out on the riverbank, clothes even more torn and muddy than they had been before. Thomas’s thirst was like his exhaustion— forgotten until it became dire— and he crouches alongside the other two, desperately bringing the stale-tasting water to his mouth.

Jack stands after a minute, craning his head back. “If we walk at the edge of the river, think they’ll be able to see us from the road?”

“No, but they’ll know we went.” Anne looks out at the water, thoughtfully. “Shame we’d ruin all our paper and powder if we just let the current carry us a bit.”

Instead, they take off their boots. The water drags the bottom of Thomas’s pant legs down, but it feels cool on his toes. They’d only bathed with a bucket of well water at the plantation, and Thomas can feel years of dirt coming off his feet.

He looks at the sun and wills it not to rise. It rises anyway.

It’s magnificent, casting the sky in pinks and oranges. It’s another thing Thomas hasn’t had a chance to witness since before Bethlem, and now that he can see it, it terrifies him. Because on the chance there wasn’t someone looking for them already, there definitely will be now.

Someone, maybe a guard, maybe Oglethorpe’s wife, or his son, or a servant— someone will start what they think is a normal day, and they’ll go out into the hall. Maybe they’ll smell the blood first, maybe they’ll slip, or maybe they’ll think he fell. Until they get closer, and they’ll see his throat slit, and they’ll probably yell— and in the room Thomas slept in for years, one of the only people he could almost consider a friend’s arms and legs will be cramping and tingling and someone will find him, will tell him what happened, and he’ll—

He’ll what?

Thomas doesn’t know how Legrasse will react to Oglethorpe’s death. How anyone will. Oglethorpe didn’t interact with the men.

Maybe someone will carry on his work, with barely a blip in the routine.

Or maybe not.

Maybe he was right, and his death will be the end. Leaving Legrasse with no way to provide for his family, Henry and the others sent to prisons where they don’t even have the chance to stand outside.

“We should hide,” Jack says finally. “They’ll look soon. And they’ll know the river is here.” The last word is cracked by a yawn.

“Well we can’t just stay down here, fuckers might have a boat.”

“Maybe there’s a barn?”

“Barn’s too obvious.” Thomas looks around. “The best hiding places don’t look like hiding places.” He’d learned that very young.

“Well that’s great,” Anne says. “Got any ideas?”

 

* * *

 

 

They scrape out copses under some of the bushes that dot the river. It isn’t comfortable, with nothing but the branches over him and mud underneath, but Thomas had hidden away Jack and Anne, and nobody will see them unless they step on them directly. He’s less sure about himself, having no one to spot him, but he pulls his feet in and tries not to breathe.

For all his exhaustion, and despite the shelter the branches provide from the sun, it takes him a while to go to sleep. He can hear the occasional hoofbeats on the road above him. A boat goes by, but he can’t say whether they’re Oglethorpe’s men coming to look for them, or normal people on their own business. If Jack is found, Anne will come out of hiding to fight for him, or he for her, but Thomas has no sense of whether they will do the same for him.

And it would make sense. If someone is caught, the others will have to make it to R’lyeh. To stop James and his men from waking Cthulhu.

To bring them home. 

Do they have a home, without Nassau?

Is Thomas ever going to have a home again?

He lies there with his hand on the handle of his machete, rubbing the dent with his thumb.

And somewhere in there, he must have fallen asleep, because when he blinks the sun is far lower in the sky. He wants to whisper out to Jack and Anne, make certain they’re still there, but not being able to see them is the point of this exercise. Some of the mud feels like it’s hardening around him, and it’s almost comfortable now, as long as he doesn’t need to piss.

Thomas closes his eyes.

He’s looking from above as two men stand on a ship, faintly lit by the moonlight. One old, the other young.

“—if there’s still no sign of them?” says the young one.

“It’s only been half a day,” the other says.

“They could be dead.”

“Oh, calm down, lad. Those two are never dead.” He doesn’t sound happy about it.

A bird chirps, and Thomas cracks his eyes open. He’s half afraid he’d crawled out and started writing in his sleep. But he hasn’t, and he doesn’t think Jack has either, and so he closes his eyes again and it’s dark, but he can just barely see James. “You say that like you want us to be dead,” he is saying.

Something rustles, but James doesn’t react to it. “I’ve put a lot of work into keeping you alive, Captain,” says Long John Silver, and then the rustling starts up again and Thomas opens his eyes, grabs his machete, preparing to—

“Get up,” Anne says. “Sun’s gone down.”

 

* * *

 

 

Around the next bend in the river, they find a fishing boat. It’s chained to a post on a dock, but the post is halfway rotted. One swing of Thomas’s machete gets them both boat and chain.

“We should leave them money,” Thomas says. “Someone comes asking about, they’re going to talk about someone stealing their boat. Someone steals their boat and leaves them a few pounds, you think they’re going to say anything? They’ll forget they had a boat in the first place.”

“They have half a farm, the boat’s probably not their livelihood,” Jack says, but still leaves a stack of coins on the dock. It’s not like they don’t have enough.

It doesn’t help with the guilt that’s making Thomas sicker every step, but he doesn’t think that’ll be fixed until they’ve gotten James safely away from any elder gods, and maybe saved the world in the process.

There is only one set of oars, so they take it in turns. It’s mostly just steering— outright paddling splashes louder than anyone is comfortable with, and the river carries them along fine on its own.

Jack slouches against the side of the boat, head lulling to one side. Anne’s curled up next to him, and Thomas can’t see where she’s looking, but he if he had to guess he’d say the road, watching for any sign of movement.

“Waits dreaming,” Jack mumbles, sitting up. He’s still asleep, but he Thomas’s bible, pen and ink out of Thomas’s own pocket without fumbling. It’s uncanny to watch, unsettling to imagine himself doing this. Night after night after night.

“Miranda always accused me of talking in my sleep,” he says, quietly. “This, though…”

“Miranda,” Anne echoes. “Your wife?”

“Yes. The Barlow woman, I suppose.”

Anne’s quiet for a moment, and Jack begins drawing something on one of the pages. And despite the dark, Thomas knows exactly which page it is, because in the moonlight he can see the blot of ink in the corner. He laughs, quiet as he can.

“What?”

“The page Jack’s writing on,” he says. “He quoted it the other day _. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than the love of a woman. How the mighty have fallen! The weapons of war have perished!”_

“Hm?”

“Second Samuel. Always one of my favorite quotes. For obvious reasons.”

“I only ever heard about the gospels,” Anne admits. “Never paid much attention.”

A woman in her position probably hadn’t had much use for God. “King David says it,” he says. “When he finds the body of Jonathan. Jonathan was his… well, the book says Jonathan was his closest friend. They formed a covenant with each other, pledged to join their houses and love each other above all else.”

Anne snorts a little, barely audible over the sound of Jack’s drawing. “Sounds like a wedding.”

“Yes.”

“You were married, though.” She says it a bit like a question, a bit like an accusation.

“I was.” He wants to say, _I am,_ but Miranda must have stopped considering herself married years ago.

“You loved her?”

Thomas smiles. “Very much,” he says. “And she loved James, and James loved her, and James loved me. We were happy.” There had been the political issues, the tensions with Thomas’s father, and with the Sea Lords, but looking back it’s the happiest time of his life.

“Oh,” Anne says. “Oglethorpe said you didn’t… like women.”

The mention of Oglethorpe makes Thomas tense. “Not like that, no. The way I loved Miranda was different from how I loved James, from how they loved each other. Not better, or worse. Just different.” Loving Miranda had been easy. Warm and fond. James had been hot and sharp and all-consuming.

“So, he likes both?”

It’s the most curiosity he’s heard from her, and Thomas raises an eyebrow. The effect is lost in the dark. “Yeesss,” he says slowly.

She snorts again. “I weren’t asking ‘cause I’m interested in him.”

He’ll believe anything she says when she’s holding a machete. “Alright.”

The silence is fraught, for a moment.

“There was—” Anne starts, and then Jack starts awake with a hiss of what sounds like _“Wgah’nagl fhtagn.”_

“You’re writing again,” she says. “Or drawing.”

They all look at the page, but it’s too dark to see much.

“Wasn’t this in your pocket?” Jack asks.

“Yep.”

“Did I just—”

“You did,” Thomas says, as cheerful as he can.

“I saw their ship’s master,” Jack says. “De Groot. The men are talking about following Flint and Silver into the city.” 

More chaos, more people to keep track of.

“Were they standing near the rail?” Thomas asks. “I think I saw part of that conversation, when we were in the bushes.” It would give them a sense of how time is passing, if indeed they’re seeing present time in R’lyeh.

“They were, yeah. And I think I saw Flint and Silver talking.”

“I did as well.”

There’s a sound like Jack has flung a hand out. “Were you going to share?”

“They didn’t say anything important. I only caught a few words. Why, what were they saying now?”

“Ah,” Jack says. “Nothing… important.”

“If they’re together,” Thomas says, “you can tell me. I’m not going to get upset.” Telling Jack about James and Miranda feels different than telling Anne, more like he’s trying to prove a point than anything else. And while he has no doubt that what Anne knows, Jack will know, he just…

He just doesn’t. The moment has passed.

“I think they’re considering it,” admits Jack. “Which, really, the timing. Less than ideal.” He taps the page. “I guess we’ll find out if we learned anything new when the sun comes up.”

The boat drifts farther East.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

They spend the morning in a somewhat sheltered inlet, taking turns trying to get the mud out of their hair.

It’s dried onto the back of Thomas’s head like a cap, and he has to lie in the water for a few minutes just to get it to loosen. He doesn’t know how Anne managed, with so much more hair, but she’d disappeared for twenty minutes before returning drenched, yet marginally cleaner.

The river isn’t doing anything about their clothes.

“We’ll need new ones,” Jack says, when they’re all done and sitting in a patch of sun. They’ll have warning if anyone is coming— the river has veered far from the road, but that doesn’t mean no one will think to follow it. But their spot has a long view of the area, and there are a few places to duck.

They also have a pistol with one bullet.

“Even if we found somewhere to buy clothes,” Thomas says, not pointing out the lack of anything resembling a tailor, “all our money won’t help us if they won’t let us in, covered in blood as we are.”

They’re going to have the same problem with food soon— they have enough for today, maybe tomorrow if they’re careful.

Jack jabs their bag with his elbow. “How is it that when we have no money, we always need it, and when we have it, it’s completely useless to us? We might as well drink pearls like Cleopatra, for all the good they’ve done us.”

Anne shrugs. 

They have precious little ink, but Thomas still adds updates to their map with a careful right hand. It’s spread out across several pages as they track the vague bends in the river. Cartographers they are not, but at some point they’re going to reach the sea, and they’re going to want to be able to approximate how far South they are when that happens. He marks off what he thinks is their current spot, and then remembers last night. Jack’s drawing.

He flips ahead to Second Samuel.

Jack has used what looks like half their ink drawing a heavy skyline. The buildings Thomas knows are huge look tiny in comparison to the monolith that juts out the top, and there are some scribbles inside. Not even primordial forces could make Jack an artist, but the intent is clear.

“Is that it, then?” Anne asks, peering over his shoulder. “R’lyeh?”

Thomas traces the craggy outline with his finger. The ink is so think it’s sunk through to the next page, and maybe the one after that, rendering almost the whole section useless. “Yes,” he says. “I think the ship is here—” he taps a spot in the lower right-hand corner— “and James and his men, they were…” he moves up, and a bit to the left. “They’re still a long way from the monolith.”

_For now._

 

* * *

 

They settle on the balcony, and Briden wastes no time in peeing over the edge.

Charming.

“If we’re waiting anyway,” Flint says, bringing out the torch, “I’m going to see what’s in here.” He lights it, and ducks through the doorway.

“Too proud to piss in public?” Silver calls after him, trying not to sound nervous. Flint will be fine. It’s a small room, or it looks like a small room. He’s got the torch. He won’t get lost. He’s not going far. They know to move slowly inside these rooms now.

“Maybe he needs to shit,” Paxton suggests. “Come to think of it, _I_ need to shit.”

If there’s another carving of that terrifying creature, Silver doesn’t think it would appreciate being shat on. But then— It’s just a stone carving. It’s not _real._

“Make sure Howell isn’t under you when you do,” is all he says.

Maybe he should follow Flint in there. Just in case.

Someone below starts shouting something about peeing in the wrong direction.

Silver closes his eyes. He just wants to—

“Silver!” Flint calls. “Come look at this!”

He stands. So does Dooley, saying something to Paxton about something treasure something. Ears prick up, and it’s Silver and about eight others that cram themselves into the room Fling had been investigating.

Joji bangs his head on the entrance. Someone laughs, and then yelps. Silver decides it’s not his business.

If the captain is surprised or annoyed to see them all there, he doesn’t let it show. “Look.” He holds the torch under another one of those freaky carvings.

“So, no treasure then?” says Briden.

The light isn’t on his face, but Silver can imagine the look of disdain Flint is wearing right about now. “Above it.”

Silver looks.

“Is that… writing?” If it’s writing, it’s not something he’s ever seen. He didn’t know an alphabet could be sinister, but there it is, a long string of the most terrifying letters Silver has ever seen. And he knows not a fuck what it says.

“It looks like. There’s more over here, too.” Another wall. This one is curved, although whether towards or away from them Silver couldn’t say.

Muttering, the men start to shuffle out. They’re alone in under a minute.

Did they think Flint was going to steal treasure only for himself and Silver?

Come to think of it, probably.

Flint takes a step towards the other wall, tracing the carved letters. The ones on the first row are as tall as his hand. “Hang on. Hold the torch?”

Silver does, moving closer— the wall is curved away from them, as it turns out— as Flint digs his blade into one of the cracks, scraping something off. He drops it into his other hand.

“Is that a barnacle?” it’s obviously a barnacle. Silver has spent too much time at sea to not recognize a barnacle when he sees one. But how one could have grown here, so high up? The walls might be damp, but they’re not submerged.

“Maybe there was a flood,” Flint says.

Maybe it was _the_ flood— but the barnacle isn’t even a hollow shell yet. It can’t have been here for thousands of years.

“If there had been water long enough for that to grow, shouldn’t there be more?” There’s never just one barnacle. “There’d be at least the remains of plants, and worms, and growth.”

“Maybe. Or maybe this place is just too hostile to life, and the only thing to survive had to hide in the cracks.”

“That doesn’t bode well for us.”

“I used to be quite good at hiding,” Flint muses. “Some people in the Navy thought I was positively mild-mannered.”

He must have been, to get away with fucking a Lord and his wife for so long. Of course, he also got caught.

Silver settles for saying, “I have a hard time imagining that.”

“And yet you don’t think someone can be two people. Still, there’s something about this place that makes me want to hide again.”

Silver touches his pockets to make sure his food is still there. “I think this place is just… bringing out the worst in everyone. The arguing. The fighting. I’ve been—” Shit. “Instincts I thought long suppressed seem to be… making themselves known.”

“Fear can do that to men, I suppose.” 

Turning back, Silver can see half of Dooley’s arm through the doorway. No one seems to be breaking out into wars over there, so he looks back at the torch. At the wall. The eyes of the monster seem to reflect the light. Seem to move.

He looks at Flint instead. “Surely you’ve been afraid before.”

Flint’s lip twitches. “Many times,” he says. “But normally, I can fight what I fear. Make it fear me back. Whatever is happening here…” he places a hand on the wall. “you can’t fight stone.”

“So you want to hide from it?” It’s not that Silver doesn’t understand the urge. He’s the one that’s made a career of sneaking in the cracks, of not being noticed unless he needs to be. He was the man nobody looked at until one day, he was the man everybody looked at.

“I don’t _want_ to hide.” 

“Well, then don’t.” It’s not like there’s any hiding anyway. “For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying not to steal your meat the entire climb. I think I’ve done an admirable job.”

Flint’s hand drops to his side. “Is what why you were staring?”

Silver raises an eyebrow. “Maybe.”

From his pocket Flint pulls a piece of tarpaulin. Slowly, deliberately, he takes the torch back. Smothers the flame. Silver wonders if is going to panic, but he doesn’t. He can still see the door.

“Hiding in the dark, now?” Silver asks.

“No.”

And then Silver is being kissed.

It takes a second to process. From last night, to this morning, to _hiding._ Oh.

That makes sense.

It’s a second or so late, but he gets an arm around Flint’s shoulders, gently brushes his teeth against Flint’s bottom lip because when they get back to the ship Flint might remember himself, but he’s going to damn well remember Silver too—

His back hits the curved wall, which is when he remembers the monster, but what the fuck, he hopes the monster enjoys it because he’s gotten his tongue into Flint’s mouth and both of them taste, awful, frankly, but it doesn’t matter because Flint’s hand is on his back, under his shirt, and—

“Fuck happened to the light?” Dooley shouts.

Silver is going to murder him in his sleep. But he pulls away from Flint.

“Taking a shit!” he yells back. “What the fuck do you think?”

Flint’s got his mouth where Silver’s jaw meets his neck. A gentle scrape of teeth, nothing that’s going to leave a mark, but if he keeps it up it’s going to be obvious that they weren’t just shitting.

And why does Silver care what the men know about it?

There’s many reasons to care. He knows that. It’s just taking him a minute to—

“I gotta shit too,” says someone— maybe Bobby— and Flint steps away from Silver with a sigh so quiet he might have missed it.

Silver supposes that he was the one who hid first, this time.

“Fuck, it’s dark in here.” Definitely Bobby.

“I’m on this side,” Silver says. “Go on the other side.”

It’s too dark to see anything, especially from right outside— it’ll take at least until the end of his shit for his eyes to adjust. So Silver lets himself hold onto Flint’s shoulder for an extra moment.

“You could have left the torch lit,” Dooley grumbles.

“I didn’t really need whatever the fuck that octopus thing is watching,” Silver says. “If you want him staring you down, by all means.”

Silence.

“That’s what I thought.”

Lips still tingling, Silver walks carefully back outside to wait for Dr. Howell.

 

* * *

 

 

They lurk outside the farmhouse for the better part of an hour.

“We can’t risk killing them,” Jack says. “That’ll make it too obvious we were here.”

“And if we rob them we might have to kill them.” Anne frowns.

Thomas would prefer neither of those plans, but he has yet to be consulted. “We’ll probably come up on a town or something soon,” he says anyway. They’ve been seeing an increased number of houses. “If we’re wearing this…”

“Right. We go and ask if we can buy some clothes, and if they get suspicious we can talk our way out.”

Anne looks askance. “When have you ever actually managed to talk your way out of anything?”

“I—” Jack frowns. “Sometimes it works.”

This does not fill Thomas with confidence. “I used to talk people into all kinds of stuff,” he says. “Maybe you should let me do the talking.”

“No offense,” Jack says, “but you can’t have been too good at it since they sent you to the madhouse.”

“No offense,” Thomas says, “but you can’t be too good at it either since you got sent to the shame farm.”

Anne says, “For fuck’s sake, do I have to talk? I ain’t talking.”

Jack holds out a hand. “Give me a moment, I’m trying to remember every word Silver ever said.”

“What?”

“He could— can— talk himself out of situations like no one I’ve ever met.”

He was Captain Flint at dinner, and now he’s going to be Silver. Thomas would ask what _Jack_ would do, but from the sounds of it, Jack hadn’t been too successful as himself.

“I’ve got it,” Jack says. “Let’s go.”

He fills them in on his cover story as they make their way up to the house. Anne and Thomas hide their machetes behind a bush next to the front door— there if they’re needed, but not immediately visible in their hands. Thomas holds his bible to his chest instead.

Jack knocks.

A dog barks.

Anne puts her hand on her hip, where the knife is concealed.

It’s a small house, without too much land to speak of, but there’s a vegetable garden out to the side and a large barn a little ways away. It’s got a patch of red paint on one wall, like they were just trying out the color. Or they didn’t buy enough and never got more.

There are no other houses within sight. Just the river, and fields that don’t look tended to.

A woman opens the door. She looks, wide-eyed, from their bloodied clothes, to Anne’s trousers, to the club sticking out of Jack’s bag, to Thomas’s Bible, and her arm tenses like she’s going to slam the door and go for a weapon.

Jack drops the bag and puts his hands in the air. “Please,” he says. “We’re not going to hurt you. We’ve come asking for help.”

A man lumbers into sight over the woman’s shoulder. He’s about her age— mid-fifties, maybe— with a face that suggests years of outdoor work, and no remaining teeth. “Who are you, then?”

“My name is John Featherstone, this is my wife Anne and our brother-in-law Tom. We were robbed back on the road, and we’re asking for your help.” The way Jack tells the story, they’d been spending the night by the side of the road when thieves came and stole their horses, their luggage, most of their food and even the clothes on their backs. “They were gracious enough to give us their own clothes, I suppose, but if you see a man in a green traveling coat do please shoot him for me. Looking like this, we’ve been unable to get anyone to help us. We’d hidden most of our coin, and they didn’t find it, so we can pay if you have some clothes to spare. And food.” He fumbles in his bag, and pulls a few coins out of the pouch of small change.

The man and woman look at each other, and back at them. Thomas adjusts the Bible a little, so they can see the title, and that seems to comfort them a bit.

“Come on in, then,” the man says. “I’m William Webb, this is my wife, Deliverance. We might have something that’ll do ya.”

Deliverance beckons to Anne. “I think I have an old dress that may fit you. Let me get it, you can try it on in the lean-to.”

Jack’s mouth twitches, but he turns it into a gracious smile.

Within the hour, Thomas is wearing his first real shirt and trousers since he left London. They aren’t anywhere near as nice as what he had then, and he’s several inches taller than William, but they aren’t white and they’re not likely to get him arrested. Even Jack, despite having what Thomas now strongly suspects is an inclination towards the flamboyant, seems content enough. He presses several shillings past what the clothes are worth into William’s hand.

 Anne emerges from the next room in a brown dress. It’s perhaps a sign of knowing her that Thomas thinks she looks ridiculous, because she’d look almost normal anywhere else. Her hair is too long and too loose, and that will raise questions, but he’s not about to ask her to put it up. It’s so tangled at this point he’s not even sure it’d be possible, and Deliverance hasn’t suggested it.

Instead she says, “Please, you must stay for supper.”

“There’s not space in the house, but you could stay in the barn overnight,” William adds. He’s probably wondering what else he can get from Jack’s purse, but any innocent, weary travelers would take them up on it.

And they’d already said they were low on food.

That’s how Thomas and the two pirates find themselves seated around a small table, with bowls of stew in front of them. It’s chewy and tasteless and the best thing Thomas has ever had.

“Are you from these parts?” William asks, gumming his meat. He must know they’re not— their accents don’t match at all. He’s waiting to see if they’ll try and lie, Thomas realizes. He thinks fast.

“I came from England, oh, ten years back?” he says, looking at Anne. She nods once, still intent on her soup. “My wife was Anne’s sister— I met them up in Arkham, but they had an uncle down here who thought it would be a good place to open a store, so the four of us worked here for a time, sold to the plantation families.”

“Your wife?”

“She died,” Thomas says, “a few months ago.” They both hum sympathetically, and all Thomas can think is that it’s true, but feels much newer and much older than that.

“And what brings you east?”

Jack laughs a little. “What doesn’t? My father died, left me some property in Pennsylvania. Things here were going downhill fast, so we figured we’d try our luck again closer to home. Maybe imports aren’t as expensive up there.”

William nods. “Prices are ridiculous. Talk about robbery.”

“So we sold our inventory, sold the property, and were making our way out. We’re just lucky the robbers didn’t find the rest of our money, or I don’t know what we’d have done.”

Deliverance clicks her tongue. “It’s terrible, what people will do these days.”

Oglethorpe’s blood on the ground, on Thomas, gushing out. Legrasse, looking at Thomas with wide, betrayed eyes.

“It is,” he agrees.

 

* * *

 

Despite his dismissal just yesterday, the barn is lovely.

There are the pigs, and rather a lot of chickens, and all of those reek, but there are piles of hay to sleep on. No mud, no branches, no guards wandering by to see when they shit. Thomas sits down on a bale, and all his muscles groan.

“We have to stay at least a little bit,” Jack says, slouching down himself. “We said we’d leave early, but if they come out, we don’t want them to get suspicious. Although it’d be rich of them, if they were.”

“You think?” It looked like they’d bought Jack’s story. If that was his impression of Long John Silver, the real man must be something incredible.

“Did you get a look at their clothes? Not the ones they gave us,” Anne says. “The others. There was some expensive fucking lace and silk on one of those dresses.”

“They buy from pirates,” Jack explains. “Most people around here do, because pirates ignore British tariffs. That’s what I meant when I said imports had gotten expensive— if Rogers has shut down most of the pirates operating in the Bahamas, prices here will have gone up. And Webb agreed with me.”

Thomas wasn’t born yesterday, thanks. “So, what, because they bought from you it means they won’t turn us in?”

“I’m working on a counter-speech, along the lines of _we get back out there and inspire more pirates, prices will drop again._ It needs some work.”

“Or,” Anne says, “they could just not find out, and you won’t have to use it. We don’t ever have to see them again.”

Jack covers his face with his hand. “You’re right, darling,” he says. “I just… do you think if we’d used our real names, they’d have noticed? Or do you think we’re forgotten already?”

It’s been, what, six weeks since their arrest? Thomas sighs. “Have you read the _Odyssey_ , Jack?”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember how Odysseus could have gotten home after the Cyclops if he hadn’t decided at the last minute to announce himself and—”

“I get your point,” Jack interrupts. “That doesn’t mean I’m not bothered.”

Everyone and their mother will know Jack is bothered. Thomas looks at Anne, but he can’t read the look on her face. She’s the only one of the three who remains standing, alternately tugging at her dress and pacing. She’d somehow snuck the knife under the dress without Deliverance noticing, and Jack had gone back for the machetes and gun, but she still clearly feels unprepared.

“We gonna sleep here?” she asks.

“We can’t show up in town in the middle of town and hire a ship in the middle of the night anyway,” Jack says. “Might as well get some sleep where there’s shelter.”           

The Webbs had said that it was a four hour walk into town, give or take. If they leave a bit before sunrise they might be able to book passage by noon. The problem is going to be when they have to wait days or weeks for the ship to set out.

And even then, Blackbeard might not even be in Ocracoke. There’s no telling how long they might have to wait for him.

But there’s nothing to be done about that just yet, so they settle in for sleep. Jack takes first watch.

Thomas welcomes the dreams more than he used to. He’s desperate for glimpses of James, for some knowledge of what they’ll be sailing into. But the visions don’t come. His dreams instead feature Miranda, walking through a burning city, and disappearing before he can reach her. Thomas runs, but someone catches his arm— it’s Anne, and she’s dressed in one of Miranda’s old dresses, and she stabs a man through the neck.

There’s fire raining down, thud, thud, _thud—_

And she stabs him— no, he’s been kicked awake.

“Horses,” Jack says. He and Anne are peering through the crack in the door.

Thomas squeezes in next to them, trying to get a look. The moon is high in the sky, showing three men on horseback approaching the Webbs’ house.

“Think we can run?” Thomas asks.

One of the men dismounts and bangs on the door.

Yelling starts up from the house.

The barn isn’t big enough to hide in, unless they can somehow pretend to be pigs. Simply ducking under a pile of hay like children won’t fool anyone, not if the Webbs admit that yes, there are travelers staying there.

The men leave the house and approach the barn.

“Get ready,” Anne says.

Jack picks up the pistol.

Thomas’s hands shake on the machete.

He can’t quite understand the voices on the other side of the door, but they’re definitely there. Men on horseback— he could take out the horse, perhaps, with the machete, but if anyone is innocent here it’s the horses. And they might want to steal the horses.

Jack and Anne have been in battles before. Won fights against all odds.

Though not every fight.

Jack move away from Thomas, ducking down behind one of the pigpens. Anne takes the spot by the door, and Thomas crouches behind the hay he’d been sleeping on.

They wait.

And wait.

Their hiding spaces won’t be worth much if they bring in a torch, but would they risk it? Someone would have to hold it, and it could burn the whole place down. In the dark, Thomas thinks he, Jack and Anne will have an advantage. They’ll know where the enemy is.

 _The enemy._ When they fuck did he start thinking like that?

They wait, long enough that Thomas wonders if they’re going to solve the issue by waiting until morning. The stripes of moonlight shift on the floor.

And then the door is kicked open, and three men come in. The one in the middle is indeed holding a torch.

Legrasse.

Thomas swallows.

“Thomas?” Legrasse says. Thomas tries not to breathe. “I know you’re here.” He takes a step in front of the other men.

They’re already past Anne. If Thomas can draw their attention, Jack might be able to get behind them as well. The two of them can either run or—

“You should have stayed behind,” Thomas says. Sure enough, the torch starts moving slowly towards him. “We let you live, you should have taken that chance.”

“I asked to come. I’ve known you for years, Thomas. I know this isn’t you. I told them I could bring you back. You gonna make me a liar?”

And the thing is, Thomas doesn’t think he’s lying. Doesn’t think it’s a trap. Legrasse probably believes that Jack and Anne have something on him, and why wouldn’t he? Thomas has given no inclinations towards murder in all these years.

“Who’s in charge now?” Thomas asks, half to keep him talking, and half because he wants to know that Oglethorpe was wrong. 

He hates that plantation. All the men hate that plantation. But there’s something more terrifying about the unknown.

“Charles.” James Oglethorpe’s brother. “I know that it was the pirates that killed him, not you. It was his fault for thinking he could take pirates in the first place. You could come back, free and clear. If you come with me now.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t explain it, it’ll sound mad. But it’s important.” They’re nearly on him now, and Thomas shifts behind the bale of hay, hand on his machete. He feels like he’s going to start crying, and he can’t do that. It’s impractical. He won’t be able to see in what little light they have. “But you can leave. Walk out of here now, pretend you never spoke to us. Please.” He hesitates. “They’ll kill you if you don’t.”

“Are you afraid of them?”

“You should be.” That’s an obvious indicator for Jack and Anne to get with the fighting or the running, but he hasn’t heard either of them. They can’t have snuck out already. He hasn’t seen anything move near Jack’s hiding spot, not even the pig. “Run, now.”

“We’re done with this, Legrasse,” one of the other men says. Tobey, Thomas thinks. He’d never much liked Tobey. Heavy footfalls are approaching him, and he grabs the machete—

And then the man screams as he’s jerked back. Thomas leaps over the top of the hay bale in time to see Anne throw Tobey to the ground and slice his chest open. She spins, and Legrasse ducks, the torch barely missing her dress, and Jack is tacking Legrasse.

The torch hits a pile of hay, and for some reason all Thomas can think is _the pigs will be burned alive_ and he dives forward, rolling Tobey into the fire, patting it down with his coat.

Tobey’s eyes are wide, blood coming from his mouth.

Thomas closes them, and Anne shouts a warning. A pistol clicks near his head—

A misfire, or his brains would be all over the hay right now—

And Anne jumps over him, at the third man, while Jack grapples with Legrasse, the club thrown one way and the sword another, and Thomas runs towards them, but he can’t tell who’s winning—

They roll into a patch of moonlight and Legrasse has his hands around Jack’s throat and Thomas doesn’t think, can’t think, but at some point, the stolen kitchen knife had fallen to the ground and he picks it up, stumbling towards the two men.

Jack kicks out, his hands on Legrasse’s face, and it takes a long time to choke a man to death but Legrasse still has a sword and it’ll only take a second for him to get to it and Thomas stabs the blade into Legrasse’s neck.

Behind him, he can hear Anne’s opponent fall to the floor.

Thomas rolls Legrasse off Jack, cradling his head in his lap. Legrasse’s mouth is open, eyes wide with surprise, and his hand twitches.

“Take their weapons,” Anne says.

“Huh—?”

“Their weapons.” She bops him in the shoulder with the hilt of a sword. “Swords, pistols. Belts. We gotta go.”

“Horses,” Jack gasps, rubbing his neck.

Thomas puts Legrasse down on a patch of hay, as gentle as he can. _I’m sorry,_ he thinks, _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, I’m sorry for your wife, for your child, for you, I’m so sorry, had to be done—_

“And horses.”

“Get our bag.”

They burst out into the yard. Thomas half expects the world to be on fire now, but it’s not— it’s silver with moonlight, the three horses are waiting outside, and there’s a lamp lit in the Webbs’ window.

“Oh, shit,” Jack says, as a shotgun shell bounces off the side of the barn. William has left the house and is striding towards them, frantically reloading.

Jack lifts one of the guards’ pistols. “I wouldn’t come any closer,” he says.

“We didn’t want no trouble here,” William says. “Please, stay away from us.”

“Three people came on horseback.” Jack nods to Anne, and Anne raises a pistol of her own. He lowers his, and sticks his hand in their sack. “Three people left on horseback. I’m sure you can find a way to get rid of the others.”

William shakes his head. “We’re good, Christian people.” Jack tosses one of the purses at him, and he flinches, letting it land at his feet. There’s probably thirty pounds in there, more money than he would have seen in one place in his life. They might need it later, but all Thomas can think is that he’s killed a man and he doesn’t want to kill a second one.

“Then give them a good, Christian burial,” Jack says.

With shaking hands, William picks up the money. “Who are you?”

Oh, shit.

Anne reaches for Jack, but he shakes her off. “I’m Captain Jack Rackham,” he says. “This is Anne Bonny. And while we’ve got you here, might I trouble you for another shirt? I seem to have gotten blood all over this one.”


	5. Which Can Eternal Lie

_That is not dead which can eternal lie,_  
_And with strange aeons even death may die._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, various works_

 

There’s no warning when Bobby falls.

Howell had returned, and they’d again started their walk. What passes for evening is fast approaching, casting odd shadows that twist up the city even more. Silver is contemplating taking off his jacket and wondering how he’d carry it if he did, Dooley is aimlessly humming—

And that’s when Bobby screams.

And stops screaming.

Silver turns around to see Paxton dropping to his knees, clinging to the sloped edge of his stair. “Bobby!” he yells, as though the problem is simply that he simply can’t be heard. “Bobby!”

The spot Silver thought was flat turns out to be angled— for a second he’s slipping and Flint grabs his shirt collar. He doesn’t let go as Silver crouches over the edge.

The ground looks close enough to touch, but Bobby doesn’t. He’s barely as long as Silver’s forearm, too small to make out anything other than splayed limbs and a still body. 

_That’s two you’ve failed._

“We have to help him,” Paxton says, brushing Joji’s hand off his shoulder when the other man reaches out. “He could be alive! He could be alive.”

Flint digs his finger into Silver’s shoulder, and Silver doesn’t need to look at him to know what he’s thinking. To know that he’s right. It’s not that Bobby is dead. It’s that they can’t possibly carry him up these treacherous stairs if he isn’t. If he’s alive, his legs are broken, his back is broken, his neck is broken—

If he’s alive, he won’t be for very long. 

And going back to confirm that he’s dead could cost them another day and a half with little food. Another day with the risk of De Groot sending some men to look for them, men that would get trapped here just the same.

Silver takes a deep breath, pulls away from Flint, and puts a hand on Paxton’s arm. He isn’t shaken off. 

“He’s gone,” he says.

“But—”

He understands the shock. Bobby had been _here,_ not two minutes ago. One stair that wasn’t flat where it looked to be.

It could have been any of them. Flint must have stepped there first. Then Silver.

“He’s gone,” he says again. “Let’s… let’s take a minute at the next landing, alright?”

Maybe they should turn back. Some of the men think so, Silver can see it in their faces— and they’re going to bring it up as soon as they can think straight. Get off these cursed stairs and check the way they’d come in. But they’ve been climbing all fucking day, and they’ll be more in danger of falling on the way down, and the monolith is… it’s got to be closer. It’s so big it doesn’t seem to have moved much, but when Silver looks back he can only just see where they started.

If the shipkiller was Flint’s anger come to life, then maybe this is Silver’s nightmare. Trapped, with nothing he can reason with, no way to fight or talk his way out. Just walking forever on a burning leg.

Even as he stands in the stone and the ooze, he feels for a second that it cannot possibly be real. He can’t tell if the sky is still above him or on one side, he can’t tell if it’s all slanted horribly or if he’s the one who’s wrong.

All he knows for certain are the faces of his men, and the broken form of Bobby, far below them.

“Let’s move,” Silver says.

And if he keeps a hand brushing Flint’s shirt until they hit the landing, either no one notices, or no one says anything.

 

* * *

 

 

 

“What the fuck was that?” Anne demands, once they’re all on horseback, the sun is rising, and they’re all in blood-free shirts once again. “What the _fuck_ were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, he’s going to be too scared to call anyone on us!”

“That’s what the money was for! You didn’t have to tell him our fucking names!”

“They think we’re dead, Anne! The greatest things we ever did were because people knew our names!”

Thomas killed Legrasse. Thomas took the knife that’s on the belt Anne has bucked over her dress, and he’d killed Legrasse.

She snorts in disgust. “No, it was because we had Max.”

“Excuse me?”

“Every idea you ever had went to shit without her. Buying the schedule from Silver. Defending Nassau from Rogers. Going back to get a fucking pardon. The _greatest things we ever did_ — getting your own ship, getting a crew, getting the Urca gold? She made that happen.”

Legrasse had brought him the _News-Letter._ Had sympathized with him. Had been _like_ him.

And Thomas killed him for the man Anne is currently laying into. He’d tried to wash Legrasse’s blood off his hands at the Webbs’ well, but it’ll be there forever.

“Now within a month, the whole world is gonna know we ain’t dead, and they’re gonna be looking for us!”

“By which point we’ll be on a ship, sailing for a city of horrors! But we might want to take a prize after that, and ships don’t surrender to dead men!”

“You weren’t thinking about any of that shit when you said it!”

“Fuck you!” they both shout at each other simultaneously.

“Be _quiet!”_ Thomas yells back.

He’s not sure who’s more surprised when they stop yelling.

“We’re getting near the town, now,” he continues. “They’re going to fucking hear you.” He didn’t used to swear this much. He blames pirates.

Anne’s sneer is back, and she kicks her horse, riding up ahead of them.

The countryside would be pleasant in the rising sun, the smell of salt carrying in the breeze, if Thomas could see anything besides Legrasse’s face. The disbelief, with not enough time to turn to anger. He’d trusted Thomas—

But he’d offered friendship to get Thomas to go back to servitude. It wasn’t genuine.

It wasn’t.

“Who’s Max?” he asks Jack, just for the sake of distraction. He knows she’s the woman who sent them to Oglethorpe in the first place. She must be powerful. The powerful woman who had Vane killed, maybe.

Jack sighs. “She owned a brothel with us, in Nassau,” he says. “Well. It’s all hers now, I suppose. She probably owns half the town at this point.”

Thomas had always thought pirates could own businesses, could be farmers— it’d been the entire backbone of his proposal. He knew they weren’t mindless brutes swarming an island. But it hadn’t really occurred to him that a pirate might own a business and sail on the account at the same time. “How did you come to own a brothel?”

He’s half expecting Jack to say it’s a long story, but of course he doesn’t. He loves telling long stories. “Charles, ah, acquired it from the previous owner, at a time when we didn’t have a ship.”

“He killed him, didn’t he.” Blood, blood in the barn, blood on the floor—

“Well, in Charles’s defense, the brothel owner tried to kill him first. The fight was about Max, actually.”

“So she owned a brothel with you, and then sent you away?” Thomas can’t help but think that she sounds an awful lot like Peter.

Jack shakes his head, then nods, then shakes his head again. It’s almost dizzying to watch. “When the governor came, she took his side against us. But she put out that we were dead, and sent us to Oglethorpe. She was trying to save us, I believe that.”

“I thought you had to kill your enemies, whether or not they were once your friends.”

“Sometimes.” Jack hesitates. “Legrasse was trying to kill me.”

“I know.”

“I think he could have.”

The famous Jack Rackham, taken down by a plantation guard. A plantation guard, defeated by a man who hasn’t held a sword in twelve years, and never outside of fencing lessons. “What’s your point?”

“My point is, thank you.”

Thomas only has part of the Max story, and he’s just curious enough to ask for more, but that’s a row of buildings appears around the bend. That’s when they get their first glimpse of the sea.

It spreads out in front of them, blue and endless, and it’s easy to see why people once thought it was the end of the world.

The port is just visible up ahead, maybe one or two miles. And in between, a lot of town to get through without being recognized.

Anne has stopped to wait for them. She’s not looking at the sea, but at the buildings, tapping out a rhythm on the handle of her stolen sword.

“We either ride through town or try and sneak around back,” she says. “Going through, more people’ll see us, going around—”

“Makes us look sneaky,” Jack finishes. They glare at each other. Thomas is used to being the subject of ire himself, but he doesn’t know how to handle this fight, which is about something much larger and definitely not his business.

Except that Thomas’s own personal business has become theirs. It might just work the other way as well.

“Then let’s go through town,” he says. “Do we bring the horses?”

“Horses’ll attract more attention—”

Anne cuts in. “—But we might wanna sell ‘em for passage.”

Thomas closes his eyes and tries not to see blood.

“Then let’s go fast,” he says. 

 

* * *

 

 

The port is small, but busy— there’s a dock, but most people ignore it, ferrying items to and from their ships in rowboats. Merchants and captains argue along the walkway, and horses roll carts back and forth.

Anne comes to an abrupt halt, pointing at a pair of men standing by a boat on the rocky beach. “Ain’t that Captain Caesar?”

Jack squints, looking from the men to the ship behind them. “If that’s the _Adventure,_ and that—” back to the second man, “is that Rodriguez?”

“Well,” she says, “it makes sense. We knew this was a pirate port.”

From the items in the Webbs’ house, Thomas realizes. Makes sense they bought them somewhere close by.  “What does this mean?”

Jack squares his shoulders.  “It means that we are either the luckiest sons of bitches to sail on God’s blue seas, or we’re about to get shot.”

“Given our record,” Thomas says, “I don’t like those chances.”

“Well, we’re still alive, aren’t we? And all three of us very publicly dead.” 

Thomas concedes the point. Perhaps, with their recent history, it is Rodriguez and Caesar who are in danger. He pats his horse’s neck, wondering if it was he or Anne that killed her last rider.

Jack dismounts with all the grace of a man who rarely rides, and Anne goes right after him. What damage she thinks she can keep Jack from causing, Thomas isn’t sure. Maybe it’s just that no one recognizes them if they’re not together.

What’s it like, to be so close to someone that they form half your identity? It’s what James has now with Silver: Thomas isn’t going to pretend he doesn’t know that. Thomas has loved, and he has been loved—  truly, deeply— but never publicly. Not like that.

He has enough difficulty retaining an identity as it is.

Horse reins in hand, he approaches the pirates.

“—evidently not dead,” Jack is saying. “Come on, Caesar, we’ve spoken at least five times.”

“Jack Rackham had those weird face hair things.” Caesar traces lines on his cheeks.

“I’ve obviously had some trouble shaving of late.”

“And Anne Bonny never wore dresses.”

“Ever heard of disguises?”

“I am afraid I am not familiar with the word,” Rodriguez says in a thick accent. _“O que é?”_

“It’s when you intentionally obscure your identity—”

“Fuck you,” Anne interrupts. “Us three need to talk to Teach about a large amount of money. Can you take us to him, or should we wait for Stede Bonnet to come by?”

 “Hullo, Anne,” Caesar says. “Jack. It’s been a while. How’s your health? Who’s your friend?”

“Thomas,” Thomas says. He reaches out a hand to shake, but nobody takes it, so he pretends he’d been trying to scratch his nose.

Jack gapes. “You reorganized us the entire time, you shitfuckers!”

Caesar laughs, bright and open. “But your face! Your face, it was amazing!” He arranges his own into what Thomas assumes is his impression of Jack.  Considering that Caesar is black and clean-shaven, where Jack is white and rather fuzzy, it’s surprisingly accurate.

Rodriguez is still scowling. “Let’s see this money, then.”

“Oh, it’s not money we have yet,” Jack says, “it’s—”

Rodriguez holds out his hand.

“Fine.”

A harsh negotiation ensues, in which Jack gives them the stolen horses and nearly all the rest of their money, as long as the _Adventure_ leaves for Ocracoke by nightfall, with Jack, Anne and Thomas safely and freely on board.

“That was terrible,” Thomas says afterward, as they climb onto the ship. “Maybe I should have done the talking. I was a politician once, you know.”

“Don’t say that too loud,” Anne warns. He grabs the hand she offers and lets her pull him over the side.

 

* * *

 

 

Anne wastes no time in procuring for herself a hat and a pair of breeches. She cuts most of the skirt off Deliverance Webb’s dress, finds a belt with spaces for the pistols and blades stolen from the guards, and the result is a woman who looks both more and less like the Anne that Thomas has known these last couple months.

She seems happy with it, at any rate. Given their sudden lack of money, Thomas isn’t sure how she’d bought them off the _Adventure’s_ crew. Perhaps they’d offered them freely, excited as some were at the fact that Rackham and Bonny were alive.

The sentiment isn’t universal. Thomas can hear the whispers, while they eat in the mess— whispers about Nassau and battles and _weren’t they done with that shit?_

Thomas doesn’t know any answers.

But he’s not the one anyone asks. Not even the best disguise could pass him off as a sailor, so word is put out that he’s a farmhand that had allied himself with Jack and Anne along the way. It’s enough to discount him in most of their eyes.

For the first few hours, he hides in the hold, surrounded by sacks of sugar. Stolen, or traded for with stolen goods. Some of it could even be from Oglethorpe’s plantation, but more likely it was grown and made by men and women far worse off than Thomas ever was. And now it’s destined to sit in some asshole’s sugar bowl, with no sign of the blood that went into it.

Thomas Hamilton had been that asshole. He’d always known the human cost, but he’d also known that industry was too big for one man to approach, much less change on such a fundamental level. Easier to ease his conscience by fixing an island he already owned.

He leaves the hold, and doesn’t return.

Despite being on a crowded ship full of waggle-tongued gossips, he’s paid the least attention of his entire life. He can roam the decks, or sit in a hammock, or watch the land go by, and no one has anything to say about it. Instead of being watched by the crew, he watches them.

It seems that only about a third of them are needed to sail the ship at any given time. This leaves the rest of the men sitting around, talking and drinking and playing games.

“It’s ridiculous,” Jack says to him once, as he watches a card game. “Gambling on ships is how fights break out. Most captains wouldn’t allow it. Teach is too smart for that.”

“Teach isn’t here,” Thomas points out. And despite his lax air, Caesar doesn’t seem to be having any problems.

“That’s true. Maybe Teach isn’t as in control as he looks.” The thought seems to cheer Jack somewhat, although Thomas doesn’t see why. Their entire plan hinges on convincing Teach to help them. If he doesn’t have control over his men, then what is that help going to be worth?

“No pirate captain has full control over his men,” Anne says when Thomas relays this to her later. They’re sitting below decks in facing hammocks. No man seems to have an assigned sleeping position here; their two nights aboard they have slept in different places, and many men eschew the hammocks altogether and sprawl out on deck or in corners. “That’s part of the point in becoming a pirate. Every man gets a say, and a vote, and a share. The captain’s job is to find the right prizes to keep the men happy. When he does that, he’s strong. When he doesn’t…”

“They kill him?” Thomas asks.

“What? No. Well. Sometimes, if he did something bad enough and everyone agrees it’s necessary. Most of the time they just become part of the crew, or they get left on an island somewhere.”

And James has been a captain for years? It sounds like a delicate political balance. “How did Jack manage it?”

Anne rolls her eyes. “He only took two prizes. The first I wasn’t there for.” And maybe it’s only because she’s still mad at Jack that she continues. “Me, him and Max had an arrangement. She was to give us leads on ships gotten from men at the inn, in exchange for a share of the prize. The crew Jack had found weren’t pleased with two women involved, and made him choose.”

What choice he made is obvious from her tone.

“Were the two of them—?”

Her hand twitches. “Only with me.” She says this quieter, with a look over Thomas’s shoulder, and he wonders if this is what she had been getting to the other night on the river. “Max and I…” He nods, to show he understands, as she continues: “She said she loved me. And I—” Loved her? Believed her? “And then she sided with the governor. When Jack was caught, Rogers sent her to negotiate with me for the cache. Sent her to lie to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas says.

“And then she sent us to Oglethorpe. Jack says it’s ‘cause she still cared.”

And Anne wants to believe that, too. “I imagine it would have been easier to kill you.”

“Maybe.” She’s got her knife in her hand, but she’s just rolling the handle back and forth between her palms. “Do you still love Flint?”

It’s a question he’s tried not to think about. Loving James isn’t something he consciously feels, anymore— it’s just a part of him. Sometimes it takes him a moment to identify the feeling, and in those moments, he fears he’s lost it. But he hasn’t. “I do.” 

“Even though you haven’t seen him in years? Even after you heard what he’s done?”

The question isn’t really about James, but Thomas shrugs anyway. “Yes,” he says. “I don’t really know him, anymore, but I’ll probably always love him.”

She looks away. “Yeah. You know what’s funny?”

There’s nothing about their current situation that is particularly funny. “No.”

“I was the one that told Max about Oglethorpe. When Jack went without me, I was— angry. Without purpose. I went to Port Royal, to try and recruit spies for this intelligence network Max and I were trying to build. I heard about the place there. Didn’t think much of it, at the time.”

If Jack hadn’t left her behind, Thomas would still be cutting sugarcane. Ignorant of what had happened to James and Miranda. Believing his dreams were only dreams.

“What did you do when you came back?” he asks.

“Went to steal the _Urca de Lima_ gold. That was the second prize. Got so much money we didn’t need to sail for months, and then the governor came.”

That’s not quite what Thomas had meant, but he supposes it’s a very personal question. He wants to know what she did, what she said, when she returned to a man who may well have resigned to never seeing her again. Who had done some truly awful things.

The situations aren’t comparable, he knows. Anne is a pirate. Her anger at Jack was at what he’d done to _her_. And Thomas doesn’t think he’s even angry at James, not really. He just…

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, when he sees him.

If he’s still alive to see.

Mustn’t get ahead of himself.

“It seems so small,” Anne says, sudden after the moment of quiet. “All of that— fighting over land, the people who fight for God, if Cthulhu is really out there.”

It’s the first time she’s brought him up. Somehow Thomas had thought of her as unshaken by the story. But her world had been just as shaken as the rest of them. “I got so used to the story,” Thomas says. “I never asked how you’ve been handling it.” She doesn’t have the dreams. She’s taking it on faith that Thomas and Jack haven’t completely lost their minds, and even Thomas still isn’t entirely convinced.

She shrugs, looking down at her hands. “Never had much use for God. All just stories, excuses to make you do what they want. So, you tell me that instead of God and Jesus there’s a bunch of ancient monsters that don’t give a shit about us, don’t have any grand plan, I’ll say it sounds about right.”

Maybe it is.

“Old Castro told me part of a story that he heard from someone else,” Thomas says. “There’s a lot he didn’t know.  Maybe there’s a plan in it.”

“Doesn’t really matter if there is, does it? We’re never going to know it.”

Now he is the one who looks away. “No, I suppose not.”

Ocracoke beach comes into sight a few hours later. Thomas watches it from the quarterdeck, with Jack and Anne on either side of him because they still aren’t speaking to each other.

“Not doing a very good job hiding,” Thomas notes. Already, he can see tents littering the beach, see men running to and fro. And that’s not including the four ships bobbing about in the bay, one of which must be the infamous _Revenge._

“He doesn’t believe in hiding,” Jack says. “And why should he? Governor Eden doesn’t have any reason to move against him— the Webbs aren’t the only ones with a taste for cheap goods.”

Of course they aren’t. Thomas waits for his old feeling of indignation about corrupt governors, but it doesn’t come. He’s seen worse men. “How long can that stand?”

Jack shrugs. “A little while, I suppose. He abhors creature comforts, thinks of the entire world as his rightful home. If they try and drive him out, he’ll just go somewhere else. We’re lucky it hasn’t happened already.”

“Anything I should know, before we talk to him?” Thomas asks.

“He don’t like Jack much,” Anne says.

 

* * *

 

 

 

When they get out of the longboat, it’s to find most of the figures in the middle of a midday nap— men lie under tents, snoring, or contemplating their toes. Pipes and bottles are slowly passed back and forth. Some women wander about, but any services they might offer are being mostly ignored.

“It’ll pick up around dusk,” Caesar says. “And I’m the lucky bastard that gets to try and motivate this lot to unload the ship.”

Thomas doesn’t envy him that task.

He wonders if this is anything like how Nassau looks. It must not be— he can’t imagine James, Jack and Anne so desperate to defend such a place. 

Caesar points up ahead, to a tent that looks just like all the others, save for the giant table outside it. What do they do when it rains?

“That’s the Captain’s,” Caesar says. “If he’s not there, just… wait around, I’m sure he’ll be back eventually.” It’s not a comforting send-off, but the man has a ship to unload. So Thomas and the others hike through the sand.

The tent isn’t closed— if anything, it’s more of a slanted canopy with an open entrance.

Thomas has heard that Blackbeard is a demonic looking man with smoke coming from his ears, and that he’s ten feet tall, and sometimes that he has a third arm with which to wield an extra weapon.

But the man in the tent only has two arms and seems to be of a normal height. He’s got his face in a book, so Thomas can’t check for devilish features, but he does have a lot of black hair.

They come to a stop outside the tent.

“Ahem,” Jack says.

Blackbeard doesn’t look up. “What?”

“May we have a word?”

And then the man turns, and yes, that’s a black beard. His squints at them for a good five seconds before reacting.

“Heard you were dead,” Blackbeard says. He tilts his head a little at Anne. “Glad you’re not.”

The inflection is pointed.

Jack sighs. “We’ve come to ask you—” 

Blackbeard turns back to his book. “Not interested.”

“But—”

“The ocean is that way.”

“We came on one of your ships, we spent all the money we had coming on one of your ships, if you could do us the courtesy of hearing me out.” Jack takes off his hat and tosses it lightly from hand to hand. “I was under the impression that we parted on more agreeable terms than this.”

“Before you got caught, with one of my ships, and all my men were hanged,” Blackbeard says. “Charles was captured rescuing you, I came back to avenge that score. And yet when we got close to the party truly responsible, Flint vanished, and you managed to get yourselves caught. The war effort is over. Unless you’re in search of a crew to join, I can’t see what you could possibly want from me anymore.”

Jack puts his hat back on his head. “We have reason to believe Flint and Silver are alive,” he says.

“How nice for them.”

“And that they’re stuck on an island, with a good chance of unleashing a creature that destroys all of life as we know it. We need to rescue them before that happens.”

“I no longer care about Nassau.” Blackbeard licks his finger before turning a page. “You’re still relatively young to this game. There was Tortuga and Port Royal before Nassau, and there will be places after it. Best learn that while you can, and move on.”

“I’m not talking about Nassau,” Jack says. “I’m taking about life. I’m talking about making the oceans unfit for sailing, perhaps land unsafe for living. You wouldn’t think of me as a man prone to superstition—”

“I don’t think about you much at all, actually,” the captain cuts in.

This isn’t going anywhere. Thomas looks to Anne, and she nods a little bit. Why she doesn’t talk when she and Blackbeard seem to have the best rapport here, he doesn’t know. But he elbows Jack aside, stepping forward.

“Excuse me.” He offers a hand. “Thomas. My father was Alfred Hamilton.”

Jack takes a breath like he’s going to say something, but Anne grabs his arm.

Blackbeard raises one dense eyebrow, but takes the hand. “Edward Teach,” he says. “Alfred Hamilton, as in the Lord Proprietor?”

“The same.” Thomas takes a couple steps into the shade of the tent. “The current one is my half-brother.”

Teach snaps his fingers. “Ah! You’re the one who committed suicide, then? Is this a whole company of dead men? Don’t look so shocked, it was important, at one time, to know who had a claim on New Providence.”

Of course they had him die in such an un-Christian way. Alfred’s idea of a joke, maybe. “They put out that I was dead. I don’t know what the cause was.”

“Hmm.” Blackbeard reaches down and picks up a bottle of rum from the sand. He doesn’t offer Thomas any.  “And why did they do that?”

“Well, I had some political inclinations my father found to be… problematic. But it was my affinity for cock that really put the nail in my coffin.” It’s a risk, but he thinks he’s read this place right.

Blackbeard throws back his head and laughs for a good long minute.

“So you got sent away, to where men go when others want them thought dead, but aren’t brave enough to kill them.”

“Somewhere like that.”

“And now you have the balls to sit in front of me and, what, asking for my help rescuing a man I’ve never pretended to like?”

“Well, I understand that Flint and Silver know the location of quite a large amount of money. With no war effort to fund, it seems like a rescue would put you— and us— in a good bargaining position to get its location.”

Blackbeard smiles. “Spoken like a politician,” he says. “But I don’t need Flint’s money. My men and I are doing quite well here.” 

That’s obvious enough, but Thomas has never met a man content with the amount of money he has. “Your life couldn’t be eased with hundreds of thousands of pounds in gems?”

“Whose couldn’t? But from what I hear, that treasure’s cursed. Flint couldn’t get it. Jack here couldn’t spend it. And that’s if the Maroons haven’t found it and dug it up yet. If you need money, there’s easier ways to go about finding it, Lord.” He watches Thomas’s face for a moment. “Unless there’s something else they know.”

There are lots of things James and Silver know that Thomas would like to. How James has been. What, exactly, happened to Miranda. Does James still— _could_ James still— love Thomas, even after what they’ve both been through. What they’ve both done.

“No, there’s a bigger reason,” Thomas admits. “Like Jack said.  Flint is very close to something that could result in an Armageddon of sorts. I just thought the money was a more believable story.”

Blackbeard leans back in his chair. “Oh, do entertain me.”

Thomas looks at Anne, who stomps out of the tent. They can see her silhouette go around it, outlined sharply on the sailcloth, before she reenters and nods. No one in earshot, then.

He turns back to Blackbeard. “Have you heard of Cthulhu?”

Blackbeard’s frown almost disappears into his beard. “Stories,” he says. “Legends. The kraken. The Leviathan.”

“I thought he was a story, too. But a few weeks ago, I started having dreams. And so did Jack. I started seeing things I couldn’t possibly know— I saw Flint’s crew, most of whom I’d never met, and I know they were Flint’s crew because I made Jack describe them to me before revealing what it was I saw. We’ve heard the same words in our sleep. We’ve _written_ the same words in our sleep, over and over.” Thomas reaches into his pocket and touches the Bible, but he doesn’t take it out. “Something is awakening in the ocean. He’s trying to break free. We can’t be the only ones to have heard it. Flint doesn’t know it, but he's close to making it happen.”

“Hmm,” is all Blackbeard says. He looks at Anne. “You’ve had dreams?”

“Nah.”

“And you believe this?”

“He’s been on that plantation for years,” she says. “With just a few _News-Letters._ But he saw that Flint had shaved his head.”

Blackbeard tugs at his own hair. “I don’t get why he did that,” he mutters. Then— “Say I believed this, frankly, crazy story. Even if we set sail today, we’re two weeks away, at least. What makes you think that we could do anything?”

Thomas tries to explain their theory of time without sounding mad. From the way Blackbeard is shaking his head, it isn’t working.

“If we’re wrong,” he tries, “it just means a trip through the Bahamas. No danger.”

“Or, you made a plan with Woodes Rogers, and in exchange from your lives, you would lure me into an ambush.”

“If we were going to do that, we’d come up with a more plausible story,” Jack says, sounding incredibly offended. “Do you think I would do that to my name? Do you think I would turn you in? I respected Charles far more than that.”

“You think the men will believe that?”

“I think if I go out there and tell them that they have a chance to save their livelihoods and get a lot of money doing it, they’ll all cheer.”

“Hmm.” Blackbeard considers them, and Thomas tries not to waver under the fierceness of his gaze. He’s got nothing on Alfred, after all. “Tell me everything you know about this place and this monster, and how you heard it.”

Is this progress? It might be progress, or it might be a trap. But they’ve gone too far now. “Well,” Thomas says, “most of what I know, I learned from a man named Old Castro at Bethlem Royal Hospital.”

Blackbeard raises his eyebrows.

 

* * *

 

 

Dr. Howell raises his water. “To Bobby.”

“To Bobby,” they echo. Silver takes a careful half-swallow. His lungs are burning and his good leg feels like it’s going to fall off. Both Flint and Howell are giving him pointed looks. Probably want him to remove the peg.

“It ain’t right,” Paxton says. “We expect to die in battle, we expect to die in storms. Not just…”

Falling off stairs in a devil city.

He wonders who Bobby’s mother was. What she’d dreamed of when she was pregnant with him. Maybe she even raised him, if she lived long enough. Said goodbye to some young man who set off to sea, on a path that would lead him to this moment. Silver tries not to think about this— his dead crew as young boys, with no idea what’s coming for them.

He tries not to think about his own mother, and the little boy he had been. Growing up into a pirate king.

Pirate king. Ha.

“Well there was Irving,” Howell says. “Remember him? Fell off the fucking mast.”

Silver freezes.

Irving, Jesus. All the death in his name and he’d all but forgotten about the first time someone killed because they thought it’d please him.

He’d gotten Irving and Vincent both killed, really. And they weren’t even the first casualties of the Urca gold— that would be Parrish and the men on his ship. Men Silver had served with and abandoned without a second thought. Maybe even the cook, although Silver hadn’t known he was killing for the gold at that point. Just knew it was something worth dying for.

He wonders if he should tell Flint about Irving and Vincent. He knows about Gates, so maybe it’s only fair. He doesn’t know if it would make him feel better.

The men have moved on. “Remember Jackson? Got so drunk he fell off the balcony at Noonan’s, broke his head on the table,” Dooley says.

“Nah, he were pushed.” Tyson bites off a piece of meat, and Silver tries not to think about his own hunger. He only has some hardtack left, and he’s saving it for tomorrow. “He tried to cheat one of the whores. Charlotte, I think.”

“Good old Charlotte. I wonder how she and Logan are doing—”

“—Still can’t believe he ditched all that gold to run off with her—” 

“Clearly you never heard him talk about her, then. You all right, Silver?”

Maybe this place is what he deserves. Although he hadn’t killed Logan and Charlotte. That’s not on him. Silver smiles. “Just thinking about old crew,” he says. “Feels like it’s been years.”

Guilt goes away, if you let it.

“We shouldn’t try and keep climbing tonight,” Flint says. “It’s already too dark. We’ll get an early start. Maybe we can even be on the beach by midday.”

“Here’s to that,” Dooley says.

Silver shuffles back so he’s in the doorway of the balcony. Or maybe it’s a window. He’s fucking exhausted, but he’s hungry and his leg hurts and. And. “I can take first watch,” he says.

They haven’t seen anything more alive than the barnacle, and if the whole city decides to tip to a weirder angle and send them all to meet Bobby and Donovan there’s going to be nothing they can do about it, but no one objects to the concept. Having a watch makes them feel safe.

Silver feels, more than ever, that something is watching them right back.

The men curl up in a pile. Except Flint. Always a few feet away from the rest, even in sleep. Silver doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t trust them, trusts himself not to roll off an edge, or if it’s just something he learned to protect himself. Don’t touch men. Don’t lie down with men. Don’t get close enough or they might learn the truth.

He’d let Silver close enough. A man that puts all that time and energy into hiding, and he’d let Silver see right through him. Silver has fought and bled and killed for that ability, and he treasures it.

Silver can’t see Flint’s face, so he watches the curve of his shoulder. The movement of his chest.

Flint won’t stop breathing if Silver looks away. He knows this, the way he knows that storms aren’t caused by a man’s pain. But Donovan and Bobby had fallen behind his back. Maybe if he just keeps watching…

He can’t see the stars to track the passage of time, but when he thinks it’s enough, he kicks Joji awake.

Silver doesn’t think he’s going to sleep, but it creeps up on him anyway— he closes his eyes and the city is twisting around him— Jack Rackham brandishes a pitchfork— Nicholas Irving falls from the mast— a blonde man stands in a field and says, “in his house in R’lyeh,”— Flint says, “dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” and Silver wants to ask what he means but Flint has his fingers up his own arse and Silver forgets— the sea is the sky and the sky is the sea—

And then his eyes are wide open, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been, because even the moon doesn’t travel right here, but he feels more awake than he has since they landed, he’s breaking out in goosebumps even though the air is warm—

Someone’s on watch. He can’t tell who it is, or which direction they’re facing. If it’s not Joji, it means he at least got a few hours of rest. Everyone else is lying still, snoring like they’ve been passed out for ages. Except for one. Someone is sitting up.

A hand lands on Silver’s leg, and he reaches out on instinct, grabbing the wrist—

Flint. He doesn’t let go, instead scooting backwards into the house. The floor is slanted, but he’s not sure which way— with a bit of shuffling, he can’t see the outline of the men, but he still knows exactly where the door is. He keeps one hand on the edge, so as not to lose it.

He finds Flint’s face with his other hand. Tries to learn it in the darkness. Stubble. Nose. Crinkled brow.

Flint’s hand is on his neck. Not threatening, like it was when they met. Just— there. Warm. Thumb resting gently against his chin.

They should talk. 

But they’ve talked. They’ve talked and they’ve talked because they’re two men who do little else.

He pulls Flint towards him, and Flint sighs quietly into his mouth.

It’s not heated, or angry, or any way he thinks they’ve kissed before.

He’s not sure he’s kissed anyone like this before.

He’s not—

 _You have to tell him,_ Silver thinks, because the thought terrifies him, and maybe if he does what terrifies him then this city won’t win. He pulls away, takes a breath, and the words don’t come and the words don’t come and he thinks, _I am not better than this,_ and he thinks, _maybe I can be._

“Vincent killed Irving because he thought I wanted him to,” he whispers into Flint’s ear. Flint presses his hand harder against Silver’s side, but doesn’t say anything.  Doesn’t scream. Doesn’t storm away. Silver’s heart rate doesn’t slow. “I found Charlotte and Logan stabbed to death in Max’s inn, and I helped her cover it up so the crew wouldn’t be distracted.”

There are more sins Silver could give him, but he doesn’t make a habit of dwelling on the far past. That part is his own.

“Why are you telling me this?” Flint asks. His breath makes the hairs on Silver’s neck rustle.

He has to think on it for a minute, has to come up with an explanation that won’t sound insane. “Because I was scared to. The longer we’ve been here, the more afraid I’ve become. And I thought, maybe, I can beat it.”

Flint kisses him again. Hard enough that Silver doesn’t ask him if this is Flint not hiding, or if they’re doing this in the dark because Flint _is_ hiding. He just kisses back, working a hand under his captain’s shirt, tracing the scars that dot his back and chest.

Silver feels just as unsteady as the walls around him, disjointed and like he could come apart at any moment.

“If I sucked you off,” Flint whispers, “do you think you could be quiet?”

He doesn’t know if he’s lying on his back or at an angle or standing upright, he doesn’t know if he’s going to come out of his skin at the next touch, and Flint wants to know if he can be _quiet?_

“I have no idea,” he says. Then, “I don’t think so.”

Flint touches Silver’s lower lip. “Shame.”

“We’re going to get out of here,” Silver says. “We’re going to get out of here, and then—” and then they’re going to find a tiny corner of Maroon Island, somewhere with nobody to hear them and, ideally, no bear pits, and he’s going to tell Flint everything he’s imagined Flint doing to him and seeing where their interests align.

That is, if Flint has this in him in the daylight.

Silver isn’t an idiot. He knows that if they survive this war, he won’t get to keep him. It would be like trying to hold seawater— possible for a short time, but in the end all he’d have would be dried, empty hands.

But he gets him right now.

It’s not the worst compromise.

 

* * *

 

They make camp as close to the tideline as they dare. True to Cesar’s word, the place gets louder the closer the sun gets to the horizon— the drinking and shouting has already begun. If it weren’t for their calloused hands, rotting teeth and weathered faces, Thomas would get the impression that these men lived lives of luxury.

They don’t have a tent to their name, and they don’t have any money left to negotiate for one, so instead they just lie down on bits of sail cloth Rodriguez had handed over.

“Do you think he’s going to help us?” Thomas asks. He’s been trying and failing to come up with contingencies— maybe they could get a small boat and enough food, and maybe they could find R’lyeh before James reached the monolith. Maybe they could stop them. But if they can’t— they’re going to need weapons. They’re going to need cannons and fire.

How do you kill a god?

Hopefully not alone.

“Hard to say,” Jack says. “I don’t think he’s as skeptical of the story as he acts, though. All sailors believe in monsters.” He picks up some sand and lets it run through his fingers. “Do you think we’re not the only ones having dreams?”

It takes Thomas a moment to remember his comment. “I don’t see how we could be. Story goes that he reaches out in dreams, right? What are the chances the only two people having them happen to be locked away on the same plantation, practically sharing a room? There have to be more.”

“I wonder what determines it, then,” Anne says. “Who gets them and who doesn’t.”

He shrugs. Jack, he understands— Jack has been desperately searching for meaning. But Thomas? Thomas had been dangerously close to accepting his lot in life. And if it were simply having had contact with the men currently wandering R’lyeh, Anne and Blackbeard would be dreaming as well.

“I don’t know.”

The ocean is lovely from here, roaring up on the beach before slinking back. He can see how its promise drew all these men and women here, searching, always searching.

“I wish Miranda were here,” Thomas says. He isn’t sure if James would appreciate him saying it— doesn’t know how much he would allow himself to be known, around Jack and Anne— but Thomas decides it doesn’t matter. It’s his own story he’s sharing, after all. His own memories. “Blackbeard would have agreed to sail with us within the hour.”

“She was that beautiful?”

Thomas decides not to be offended by the doubt in Jack’s voice. “I mean, yes, but that’s not why. She always said I was the argumentative one, and maybe that’s so, because she didn’t have to argue. She just had this way of cutting in with some devastating truth, and then simply outlasting her opponent.” That’s how she seduced James, he doesn’t add, because that’s James’s business.

“Well, I’m sorry I never met her,” Jack says. “She sounds like quite the woman.”

She was. She’d have chewed Jack’s entire sense of self up and spat it back out, but Thomas doesn’t say that. He thinks Anne guesses, though, from the way she snorts.

“I heard,” she says, “she was fucking the pastor from the interior.”

Thomas smiles, leaning back on the sand. “That sounds like her.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Max’s spies.”

“Of course.” Jack doesn’t sound bitter, exactly, but it’s hard to place his tone.

Thomas closes his eyes, letting their conversation fade into the background. Lets himself get lost in the irregular shouting from the campfires and the sounds of the ocean. Lets himself drift. He sees flashes of R’lyeh, but it’s wrong and distorted. Not in its normal way, but in the way of a real dream, grabbing onto any image from his subconscious.

“How long are you going to stay angry with me?” he hears Jack ask, as if from a great distance. “No harm seems to have come.”

“Don’t mean it won’t,” Anne says. Thomas imagines armies coming for them, with Webb at the front, and he rolls over a little. Sand gets in his nose, and the army is suddenly walking across a desert. “I just want you to…”

“Want me to what?”

“What I care about is getting the three of us out alive. You being dead but remembered, that’s not a win for me, you understand?”

“I suppose, I— the three of us?” There’s silence, and in the silence, Thomas sees Legrasse fall, but it’s light out now, he can see his face as it turns into James’s. Thomas jerks backwards, but his body only twitches. “When did Thomas become part of _us?”_

“Well, not _us-_ us.”

“Whatever that is these days.”

Days, days. Days. It’s morning on R’lyeh, and he watches from above as the men struggle to climb the stairs. They move slowly. Sluggish. The man with the long black hair wipes his brow and reaches down to pull another up behind him. 

A man falls, and someone screams, and he lands and there’s a sharp pain in Thomas’s side and he thinks for a moment he’s the one that landed on hard stone, but he’s just been kicked. He’s slept through the sunset, so all he sees is a silhouette standing over him, and for a second he thinks _guards_ and reaches for the machete—

“The Captain wants to see you,” Rodriguez says. He then follows it up with something in Portuguese that Thomas is sure isn’t polite.

Jack and Anne are both still upright, either awake or never having slept in the first place. Thomas gets to his feet, and feels loose sand that had gotten into his shirt collar fall into his trousers and pants. He’s going to talk to Blackbeard again with sand in his pants. Most excellent.

He’d slept through the rest of the evening socializing, it seems— the moon is high in the sky and while there are a few men roaming the beach, most have gone back to sleep. There’s a horse outside Blackbeard’s tent that hadn’t been there before, and small table and a few more chairs have been dragged under the cloth awning.

Blackbeard points to them. “Sit.”

Secret meetings in the dead of night usually meant Thomas was closer to his political goals. Or his romantic ones. Hopefully, pirates operate in a similar way.

They sit.

Blackbeard leans forward, his elbows on the table. “Who knows you’re alive?”

Or perhaps not.

“There were the men who worked at the plantation, of course,” Thomas says, trying to step on Jack’s foot. “And the owner. We had to kill him in our escape, which sent some of the guards after us— they found us when we were staying with a farmer to the south. We killed the guards, but the farmer may have learned of Rackham and Bonny then. We paid him and his wife to dispose of the bodies, figuring that would cover our tracks better than additional murder.” Maybe he shouldn’t have used the word murder, but Blackbeard doesn’t question it.

“Who else did you interact with, since the dreams started?”

“No one outside the plantation,” Anne says. “Those farmers were the only people we talked to ‘till we got to the port and found Cesar and Rodriguez.”

Blackbeard looks at Jack. “And you would swear this on your life?”

“Yes.”

He tilts his head towards Anne. “On her life?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” He looks between them all, now, and Thomas again has to work to not fidget under his gaze. “And you said you’d been writing, drawing in your sleep?”

Thomas nods.

“Show me.”

They’ve gone this far. Thomas pulls out the Bible and slides it across the table. If Blackbeard’s offended at the defacement, he doesn’t show it, instead flipping through the ink-stiff pages. The map, the lines and line of writing.

_In his house in R’lyeh—_

It feels rather like his subconscious being pulled out and examined, and Thomas’s only solace is that Jack looks as uncomfortable as he does.

Blackbeard stops on Jack’s drawing of R’lyeh’s skyline, tracing the edge of the monolith with his fingers. And then he pulls from his coat another piece of paper, unfolding it and looking between the two.

“Cthulhu waits dreaming,” he says. “Have either of you seen Cthulhu himself?”

“He’s in the monolith.” Jack reaches forward like he’s going to take the Bible back, but Blackbeard presses his hand down on top of it. “We’re hoping it never comes to that.”

“I saw rough sketches,” Thomas says. “In Bethlem. Tentacles and wings, mostly.”

“Well.” Blackbeard puts down his own piece of paper, turning it so that they can see. It’s far more detailed and complete than anything Castro had shown him, and in the candlelight, it looks more alive than it should— a demonic creature with an octopus-like tentacled face, long ropey arms and wings sharp like a bat’s around his head. Behind him is the familiar line of the monolith and surrounding buildings.

Even in the uneven strokes of a pen, his eyes look alive.

“Who drew this?” Jack asks. When he picks it up a shadow obscures half the image, and Thomas can’t find himself to be upset about it. “Did you draw this?”

He didn’t. There are no ink stains on his fingers, and there’s— Thomas can’t quite place what it is about him, but he knows Blackbeard hasn’t been dreaming.

He waits to see if he’ll lie.

He doesn’t.

“No.” Blackbeard offers no further explanation, folding the drawing again and tucking it into his coat. “So here is what’s going to happen. The fleet is going to sail for the Caribbean. When we reach the island, _if_ we can reach the island, our first goal is to prevent Flint’s crew from opening the… house. Getting his men out comes third, after my men. That was a cute game you played earlier, Hamilton, but I know Rackham knows where the cache is, and he’ll be giving me that information.”

“Earlier you said you had no interest in it,” Jack says, “and you believe us about the monster—”

Blackbeard shrugs. “It’s expensive to provision five ships. If we survive this, I’ll live out what time I have left in comfort.”

_What time he has left?_

They stare each other down for a second, and Anne jumps in before Jack can try to bargain. “He’ll tell you when we’ve left R’lyeh,” she says. “And not before. And you don’t get all of it— Flint still has a claim.”

“And if Flint dies in a way we think you could have prevented, your crew’s share goes down,” Thomas adds. “We don’t want him running into any accidents.”

Blackbeard squints at him. “Why?”

“Are you going to tell us who drew that picture?”

They both frown, and then Blackbeard slides the Bible back across the table. “Furthermore,” he says, “if there’s any sign that you’re leading us into a trap, I woold all three of you. Agreed?”

“I’d prefer it’s _clear_ evidence that we led you into a trap,” Thomas argues. “I’d rather not lose my eyeballs at the sight of any passing Royal ship.”

“If I think I’m about to get arrested and it’s your fault, you’re dying a painful death. That’s non-negotiable. Anything you want to tell me now, to prevent that fate?”

“Not unless one farmer has raised an army.”

“Good.” Blackbeard raps his knuckles on the table.  “I’ll talk to my crew tomorrow. If they agree, we’ll start supplying. You know where you’re going, don’t you?”

Thomas smiles. “Of course.”

They exit the tent, going back to their little patch of beach.

“Jack,” Thomas whispers. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“Well, I know the area where the _Walrus_ disappeared, and I know where we looked for him, so… I think so?”

They’re going to get their eyeballs squeezed out of their heads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone else forget about Teach's Iron-Man-Shrapnel plotline that was literally never mentioned again?


	6. Seas of Infinity

_We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

 

Everyone aches the next morning.

Two nights on the ground, one day on the stairs. Few rests, little food.

Every bone in Silver’s body feels worn. Sanded away like rocks on a beach.

He’d also woken up with Flint curled around his back. Which would be ideal in most circumstances, except for the way Paxton has noticed. Considering that most of the men slept all in a pile, it’s only suspicious if he lets it look suspicious.

Flint hadn’t looked suspicious. He’d acted like that was a perfectly normal position to be in when he awoke, and had taken a piss over the side without even hesitating, leaving everyone else to awkwardly look away.

The stairs feel even worse today than they did yesterday. Some of the steps are higher than Silver’s knees, and he’s forced to push himself up to get his good knee on them, then do a side-roll. It would be slightly, _slightly_ more tolerable were it not so slimy.

No one talks. No one has the breath to talk.

And the monolith doesn’t look a whole lot closer.

A couple hours after their start, the stairs end at a tunnel-like building. If Silver tilts his head, he can see their path coming out the other side. They just have to walk through.

Simple.

Not simple.

The last time they went that far into a building—

“Fucking shit,” Dooley says. “Do we have to go in there?”

Flint looks from the tunnel to the ground, which lies an unknowable distance below them. “Well,” he says. “Yeah.”

The entrance is carved with the image of the tentacled monster, arranged so that the doorway looks like the creature’s gaping mouth. Shiny stone eyes watch them from above.

Silver doesn’t have any desire to go inside, either.

“Fuck that.” Paxton crosses his arms, hands clenched into fists. “I’m not doing it.”

“If you see a way around it, by all means,” Silver says.

“Maybe we can stay here for a bit,” Briden offers. “Think on it some.”

“Think on what?” Flint may well be working up into a mood, and Silver steps in front of him, trying to head him off.

“There are only two paths. There’s going forward, and there’s going back. We know there’s no way out behind us, so we go forwards.”

“There’s the way we came in,” Paxton says. “We know that way. Maybe if we’d have waited, we could have gotten out. We shouldn’t have come this way in the first place.”

Flint is not heeding Silver’s unsubtle warnings. “You’re welcome to turn around. And wander the city by yourself until you die of starvation.”

“That’s not what we’re doing now?” Briden chimes in.  “At least we know how far we’ve come. Do we know how far we have left?”

Silver risks taking his eyes off them to take another look at the monolith. No, he has no fucking idea how far is left, because distance here is fucking _fucked._

“We’re almost there,” Flint says, with the kind of confidence that accomplishes things.

Paxton puts his hand on his sword. “You’re full of shit. And I’m tired.”

“We’re all fucking tired,” Silver says. He’d eaten the last of his food this morning. He wants to take off his metal leg and bash Paxton in the face with it, but that would just remind them that he’s an invalid.

But Paxton looks down at his missing leg anyway.

“Maybe you should have stayed on the ship,” he says, and Silver isn’t the only one who picks up on what he means because Joji punches Paxton. Not off the edge, but into the wall by the tunnel entrance. Paxton moves to punch him back, but Joji catches the hand. And then looks to Silver for permission to keep going. Silver is tempted to give it.

Flint had warned him against this, when he had learned about Dobbs. About punishing others unnecessarily. It had been a little rich, considering Flint had shot two men in the head not two weeks prior, but the point had been good.

And if they’re going to get out of here, they can’t waste time with this shit. So Silver shakes his head, and Joji steps away.

Maybe Paxton’s right and Silver shouldn’t have come. But if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have gotten to kiss Flint. If he hadn’t, he’d be down on the ship, wondering if he’d ever see him again.  It’s a trade he thinks he’s willing to make, right now.

Paxton spits. No actual blood comes out, but it seems to make him feel better to do so.

“Glad that’s settled,” Flint says. He goes about lighting the torch.

“We stay together,” Silver orders. “Everyone hang onto the shirt of the man in front of him, and shuffle, don’t walk.” He waits as men all climb onto the landing, all looking nervously at the carved monster.

 _Stay calm,_ he tells himself. They know what they’re walking into here, or at least more than they did two days ago. His hand doesn’t shake as he grabs the fabric of Flint’s shirt. Flint looks back to raise an eyebrow at him, and he shrugs.

“Don’t breathe so close to my neck,” Silver tells Dooley, who leans back.

And then they start to shuffle.

Silver’s metal leg drags across the rocky stone, and he focuses on that, instead of how they’re walking into the mouth of a monster. Like before, darkness happens very quickly once they’re past the doorway— the first time Silver looks back, it looks like a skylight over their heads. The second time, it’s a dot in the distance, even though it’s only been a couple of minutes.

“Walk faster,” says Howard.

“Walk slower,” says Tyson.

“Once we get out of here,” says Dooley, “I’m gonna stand on flat ground and look at a flat sky, and I’m going to drink so much rum.”

“The sky isn’t ever flat,” Howell calls from the back of the line.

“You know what the fuck I meant!”

Flint reaches back with the hand not holding the torch and taps Silver’s arm. There’s another set of writing, illuminated in the faint light: it looks like it’s angled near the ceiling. There’s a carving near it, too— a depiction of a city with a monolith like this one, but far vaster.

“Think there’s more places like this?” Silver whispers, below the sound of the men arguing.

“Maybe,” Flint says back, just a touch louder. “Or maybe this one’s bigger than we thought. When I got a view from the tower before, there were some rocks in the water on the far side of the island. Maybe…”

Maybe they weren’t rocks, but more of this city, below the waves.

Who could have built such a place? Who could have lived in it, and not been driven mad? Or maybe they were mad to start with, and that’s why they built it. Perhaps it was this that made the giants and the Cyclopes and the Nephilim into monsters.

“Hold!” Flint barks, stopping short. There’s a rustle as he slides his foot forward. “That’s sharp downturn here. Let go for a second, I’m going to see if I can find a way around it.”

If he lets go and Flint falls, they’ll be in the dark and the men’s lives will be in his hands.

If he lets go and Flint falls—

Flint takes a step forward, and Silver uncurls his fingers.

The torch seems to turn as Flint goes forward, dragging his leg along as he feels for the edges. It occurs to Silver that maybe they’d be better off without the torch at all— their eyes are only tricking them here.

But he had nothing but the sound of Donovan falling.

The light will stay.

Flint comes back after another minute. “We need to veer to the left,” he says. “Go slowly.”

This time, Silver grabs the back of Flint’s elbow instead of his shirt. He feels it tense for a second, and then relax. It’s all the recognition Flint gives as they begin their long shuffle to the side.

A thought occurs to him, and Silver leans forward. “I don’t think this was what you meant when we discussed journeying into the darkness.”

Flint snorts. Silver counts it as a win.

Then something yanks on him, and Silver nearly lets go— Flint grabs his arm as the whole line of men bows out.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Tyson says, scuffling on the edge of the drop until he’s safely back on the edge. “Shit, shitfuckers, I’m fine, it’s fine. It’s fine.”

They move again, slower than before. For a few moments there’s silence, presumably everybody trying to figure out how close they themselves came to death.

If Dooley’s right and they’re dead already, maybe they’re approaching Hell. Or maybe they’re coming out of it, in some twisted version of an Orpheus story. Flint’s the one who would have thoughts about that, but Silver can relate to a long path to the light, unable to look back.

Someone starts humming. Briden, Silver thinks. Tyson chimes in with words, and within a few minutes they’re singing as they make their careful way through the dark.

 

* * *

 

 

Thomas had known, in theory, about the inefficiency of ships. By their nature they could not be scheduled, and by pirate nature they could barely be encouraged. It takes ten days for them to set sail— ten days of vague answers about the nature of what they’re fighting and where the money comes in, ten days of men running to and from town for victuals, ten days of delays and bad deals and the occasional fight.

Sometime in the last ten years, Thomas had become a man unsuited to waiting, when he had an actual goal in mind. To think he used to be decent at politics.

“It’ll be fine,” Jack says, looking just as anxious as Thomas feels. “Time in R’lyeh is going at an incremental pace. We have at least a four-week window to be just in the nick of time.”

Maybe.

It’s a relief to set sail, though. The three of them are to be on Blackbeard’s flagship— not as much a sign of status as a sign of Blackbeard wanting to keep an eye on them. They get a new supply of ink, and take to sleeping in one corner of the deck, desperate to write or draw anything that will give them more direction.

_In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._

It’s three days after that that the _Walrus_ men disappear.

They must be in one of the buildings, but Thomas can’t see them. He and Jack had been tracking them on one of his drawings of the city, but now they can’t see where they are— sometimes Thomas catches snatches of voices, bits of a song, but the rest is just an empty stairway.

Once, he remembers himself. He tries to pull backward, to see if there’s any sign of where the island is. Sometimes he gets flashes— a cliff line, which he hastily redraws the next morning. Some fog.

Most of the time, he forgets to look. He forgets he’s himself. He becomes the city, the stone, the sun.

He’s happy to sleep most of the day away, when he can. He’s not alone in that among the men.

Because sailing is, he’s learning, incredibly boring.

There’s nothing to do but walk up and down the ship. As ships go, it’s a big one, but there are too many men on it to make it feel its size. He doesn’t know enough to be able to tell one country’s ships from another, but it must have belonged to Catholics— there are spots on it where carvings have been scraped off. More suggestively, the disembodied right arm of a crucifix points the way to the shitter.

Ship thus explored, the only book Thomas can read is his defaced Bible. The only people he can really talk to are Jack and Anne, and eventually he starts telling them stories. Mostly about Miranda. Occasionally, James.

Sometimes they tell him stories back.

Not to make a point, like Jack had been doing on the plantation, but little things. Innocent things. Antics from the brothel, antics from pirate ships.

Anne keeps watch while they sleep.

And Blackbeard—

He just watches.

“How do you know Flint?” he asks Thomas, a few days into their voyage. They’re nearing Spanish territory, now, and it’s putting everyone on edge.

“What?”

“You and Anne mentioned you knew him, once. I’m wondering where, and how.”

Thomas is standing on the deck, watching the sea. There continues to be nothing on the horizon, and if there were a man in the rigging would likely see anything of interest first, but Thomas is rather tired of looking at the people behind him. “I don’t see how that’s your business.”

“You’re on my ship, telling me where to sail. That makes it my business.”

“Alright,” Thomas says. “Who drew that picture you had?”

Blackbeard smiles at him, full of teeth.

“Shame.” Thomas turns back to the sea.

But— “My wife,” Blackbeard says. “A couple months back.”

Thomas tries not to react. “I didn’t realize you were married.”

“I’m not. She died, about a month ago. Infection.”

“I’m sorry.” Thomas considers trying to forge some common bond with this man with stories of the death of his own wife, but Blackbeard doesn’t like James. Doesn’t trust James. And he’s smart enough to keep track of everything Thomas says, to see if he can use it later. Thomas won’t give him Miranda.

“I didn’t know her well. We were only married three weeks. She was my tenth wife.”

Thomas continues not reacting. “When did she start having the dreams?”

“I don’t know. She liked to draw, though. Liked to sculpt with clay, when she had it. She must have been having them for a while, because she spent a lot of time keeping it from me. Found out eventually. She didn’t tell me much. Just said that same thing— about his house, and his sleep.”

And then she died. Just like Castro. “What kind of infection?”

Blackbeard rubs a spot above his heart. “She stepped on something in the street. Cut her foot. Didn’t think much of it at the time. It’s only later that you realize how much those little things matter.”

Thomas knows. 

Lingering looks. Lingering handshakes. A drunken confession to Peter about his attraction to men, back when they were barely out of childhood, and Peter had promised never to tell a soul. He’d kept that promise for fifteen years, and then he used it to destroy him.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

Blackbeard shrugs. “Maybe I’ll have time to try again,” he says, hand still on his chest. “Your turn.”

He’s quick, Thomas will give him that. To amass a fleet of this size, and keep his men in order, Blackbeard must be either the bravest, the luckiest, or the most manipulative man Thomas has ever heard of.

“I met Flint when he was in the Navy,” he says. “He was their liaison in a political matter. I only knew him for a handful of months— he shipped out, I had my falling out with my father, and never heard what happened to him until now. You can imagine my surprise when I found out.”

“I suppose you never really know what men can do.”

It’s been two weeks, and Legrasse’s blood still hasn’t come out from under his fingernails. “I suppose you don’t.”

“Flint stole this ship.” Blackbeard runs a hand down the rail, confident that no splinter would dare stab him. “After they secured the Urca gold, he, Rackham and Charles planned to use it to defend Nassau.”

James has been on this ship. Thomas touches the wood with slight reverence, wondering if James had ever done the same. Wondering what he did here. How he _felt_ here. But if he only gave it up after Jack had taken the _Urca_ , then does that mean this is the ship they sailed to Charles Town? That this was the last place Miranda had ever been safe?

“How did you get it?” Thomas asks.

“When the governor arrived, and promised them his pardons, the most of the men no longer had an interest in protecting Nassau. Charles and I left with Nassau's fleet and her resisting men, sending a fireship up ahead to break their line. Just like the men of Nassau, the governor’s people caved before something far more powerful.”

Thomas considers this. “Are you telling me that if Cthulhu awakens, your men will flee?”

“No. I’m telling you that the governor’s way of life— the one Flint was trying to achieve, the one Charles tried— it leads to cowardice. Complacency. When your comfort is more important than what you’ve sacrificed to get it: that’s when you’re no longer your own man.”

Thomas thinks of that bowl of sugar next to a tea set in London. He thinks of Miranda and Peter and jokes they’d shared over dinner, never imagining the violent future that shimmered in the space between them.

He doesn’t ask if killing others is the only way Blackbeard can imagine being his own man.

A few days later, he dreams of James and Silver standing in front of the entrance to the Monolith.

 

* * *

 

 

The end of the tunnel looks blocked.

A dark square with glowing edges, and Silver braces himself for the yelling—

But they step out of the tunnel easily.

And Silver realizes it wasn’t a barrier. It’s the monolith, so big it barely let the light though, despite what seems to be at least a thirty-foot distance between it and the tunnel.

“Told you we were close,” Flint mutters. Silver ignores him.

Standing in front of the monolith, it’s almost hard to imagine a reality around it. Silver can’t see the top, and it takes him a moment to see the sides. They’re not _far,_ at least, not as far as any distance they’ve traveled today, but it takes a moment to focus his eyes and look towards the ocean. To the left, the platform they’re on ends at a wall about waist-high. Beyond that that it looks like a short path to the beach.

They’ve been walking upwards for a day and a half, so Silver isn’t sure how they can be level with the sea, but perhaps that’s a trick as well.

If they’re in the right place, a trip down the beach should put them within sight of the _Walrus._ After that, they just have to catch the attention of whoever is on watch and get them to turn the ship around. Send the longboats. They could be off this island in just a couple hours.

Silver takes a deep breath, closing his eyes and smelling the salty air.

It’s been salt the whole time, but there’s something about the sight of the ocean combined with the smell that makes him feel he’s back in familiar territory.

God, and to think he used to hate the sea.

“Hey,” Tyson says. “I think these are doors.”

He’s pointing to two intricately decorated panels, either lying either slanted or flat. They’re carved in the way that elegant screens are, but the patterns and creatures are something more ghastly than Silver can name.

“If they had treasure,” Tyson says, “they probably put it in here for safekeeping, wouldn’t you think?”

Maybe that’s what made the monolith seem like it was calling to Silver, from down below. Maybe he’s finally getting a pirate’s instinct for sniffing out riches.

There’s certainly something enticing about it. Doors that decorated invite themselves to be opened. Tyson’s idea isn’t entirely illogical— maybe Flint and Silver were right about a flood, and the people who lived here had hidden valuables inside before the water came.

Or perhaps it was the work of giants. Perhaps ancient treasures of the gods are waiting for them.

“We came all this way,” Paxton says. “Bobby died coming all this way. Say this is full of gold, and after all we’ve been through, we just leave it?”

More of the men are gathering around the doors, now. Flint gets an expression Silver thinks of as ‘I am Moses trying to walk through the desert and these are the wayward Israelites fucking up at every turn.’  Although he probably thinks of himself as Odysseus, with foolish crewmates that do things like eat the wrong goats, or something. Silver hasn’t read the _Odyssey._

“Let’s take a vote, then,” he says. “All in favor of going in?”

All the men but Flint shout _ayes._  

At Silver’s nod, the men begin crawling over it, looking for a knob, a lock, touching every monster that glares from the surface.            

 

* * *

 

 

They see the cliffs and the ship at the same time.

“Sails!” someone hollers from the rigging. Blackbeard shouts for a spyglass, giving Thomas, Jack and Anne a warning look.

“Those are the cliffs from your drawings, correct?” Blackbeard says. Thomas nods, but pulls the Bible out anyway to show him. “I don’t think I have to tell you how bad this looks, for you keeping your eyeballs.”

“It’s one ship. You have five ships.” The sails are rolled up, so there’s not really the chance that the other ship is just passing through, but—  “Maybe someone else is having dreams. Maybe they came to help.” It doesn’t seem probable, but neither are the last few months of Thomas’s life. Blackbeard scowls, but doesn’t order them all woolded, instead looking through the glass. Jack, Anne and Thomas are left to speculate.

“There’s no way to tell who it is from this far out,” Jack says, voice lower than normal. “Won’t be able to really know who they are until they’re right on top of us. We’re near the shipping lanes, of course, so it stands to reason there’d be ships, but for there to be a ship waiting right there, right now…”

“I don’t think—” saying its name feels like inviting something, when they’re this close— “I don’t think what we’re trying to stop can control ships.”

But he can influence dreams. Is it really so impossible—?

“They’re hailing us,” comes the report a little bit later. Blackbeard hands Thomas the glass, turning away.

“Signal the other ships to stay just behind us!” He doesn’t seem to want Thomas to do anything but hold his stuff, but Thomas looks anyway. It brings the ship from a distant smudge to a slightly closer smudge, flying a flag that is maybe red, maybe white, maybe some other color, who’s to say. He passes it off to Jack, who makes the same assessment.

Sailing feels especially slow when the destination is in sight.

As they get closer, a small, single-sail boat is lowered from the waiting ship. It’s far faster than the fleet as it approaches. Thomas had thought the wind was behind them, but despite his efforts in recent days, he still doesn’t understand the first thing about sailing.

“We’re low on time,” is all he can think, all he can say. “We need to hurry.”

They might only have hours, now. 

 

* * *

 

 

The boat waits somewhere in the expanse between their two ships. One man balances on the edge, waving a white flag. Blackbeard sighs, points at a man standing next to one of their own boats, and jerks his thumb to the sea. There’s a quick burst of activity, and then a boat is sailing from the _Revenge_ to meet them.

Thomas has lost the habit of pacing years ago, for lack of space. Instead he taps his finger on the rail, watching as the two boats pull up next to each other, roping together. They bob for a few minutes, drifting— and then Blackbeard’s boat separates, rowing back.

He doesn’t have a clock, but the whole thing is taking too much time. Too much time. By the time they sail into R’lyeh, they’ll only have minutes.

And Thomas realizes he is afraid.

Fear isn’t something he’s thought much about, until this point. It’s been such a constant in his life for the last ten years that it’s not something to note anymore, outpaced as it has been these last few weeks by guilt, adrenaline and anxiety.

He’d thought they could get to James with plenty of time to spare.

And now—

James could die any second. And Cthulhu could burst forth, awakening the other Old Ones. The world could end in fire by the end of this week, and Thomas is no longer indifferent to that possibility.

“It’s the governor’s ship,” Blackbeard’s man announces when he gets on board. “Of Nassau. They have orders for the arrest of Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny. Alive. And a significant sum of pearls for the one who hands them over.”

Jack and Anne look at each other. Thomas wonders if they’re going to have to fight Blackbeard’s entire crew— they could decide those pearls are better than what James can offer them—

“Do they know who we are?” Blackbeard asks.

“Yes, they had word that the two were seen boarding the _Adventure_ about two weeks ago. The rest of us are not to be harassed if the exchange is made.”

“Of course not,” Blackbeard says. “They don’t have a chance against us. Are we in the practice of selling our own to cowards?”

The men give a roar of disagreement, and Thomas tries to relax.

“You three, a word.” The captain points again, this time at the cabin.

Thomas stops relaxing. Something tense is growing in his stomach, and he crosses his arms tight.

Blackbeard’s cabin is the one place Thomas hasn’t explored, sure the captain’s allowances to them wouldn’t extend that far. But it hadn’t stopped him from being curious. James must have slept in there, for a time. Miranda must have as well. But there are no signs of their presence when he enters it— like the rest of the ship, it must have at one point been stripped bare because all that’s left of its decoration is some carved wood near the ceiling. It doesn’t even seem to be the captain’s cabin alone: several hammocks are strung up inside.

“I don’t think the governor knows we’re alive,” Jack says the second the door closes.

Blackbeard also crosses his arms. It looks more imposing on him than it does on Thomas. “Explain.”

“Woodes Rogers, paying in pearls to take us alive, letting the rest of you go? That’s not like him. For starters, he’s in a large amount of debt— the idea he’d pay any significant sum for any two pirates and let you, who was more responsible for his defeat than we are, sail free—  it’s ludicrous. No, our transportation to Oglethorpe’s plantation was done with the assumption that everyone else, including Rogers, would think us dead.”

“Who knew you were alive?”

“Max,” Anne says quietly. “The owner of the inn. She might even be trying to send us a message, paying in pearls.”

“Max.” Blackbeard tilts his head a little, trying to place the name. “And you think a brothel madam would have the power to send the governor’s ship after you?”

Jack splays his hands. “Eleanor Guthrie might. We know she’d wormed her way into Rogers’s head, his cabinet, probably his bed—”

“You didn’t hear?” Blackbeard asks. “They’re married now.”

Anne betrays her surprise with widening eyes— Jack’s jaw near hits the floor. “Well, then,” he splutters. “There you go. She and Max were— are— ah— close,” he glances at Anne and then away, “and Max did always have a taste for pearls. They’re trying to cover up the entire affair. They both know that you and I have a rocky history, so they must be counting on your ambivalence and your crew’s affinity for shiny things.”

“And they still want you alive.”

Anne scowls. 

“Be that as it may,” Blackbeard continues, “destroying the ship of the governor right here would give him good grounds to send men after us in North Carolina.”

“If he ever found out it was you.”

“Those two women couldn’t keep the disappearance of one of his ships and three dozen of his men a secret.”

“They could say they defected,” Anne mutters. “He had a lot of trouble with that.”

Thomas digs his fingernails into his arms. “If we keep dithering about this,” he says, “an unknowable monster is going to burst free from behind those cliffs, and no one is going to give a damn which ship disappeared first. How long will it take to fight through them, if they don’t let us pass?”

“A few hours,” Blackbeard says. “And we’ll take damage.”

And if they take damage, it might make it harder to get James out of R’lyeh. Thomas presses harder. He can feel bruising.

“But,” the captain continues, “I think they’ll get out of our way.”

 

* * *

 

 

They sail straight for the waiting ship.

“They’ll be curious,” Jack mutters to Thomas. “They’re wondering if we’re going to meet with them, but they’re going to be arming themselves just in case.”

They draw closer still, and Thomas eyes Blackbeard where he’s standing at the helm. “Think they’ll try and stop us?”

“The governor’s ship won’t shoot first,” Anne says. She’s squinting at it like she can see it better just by force of will. “They know that if they do, we’ll fire back, and they’ll all die. They may have even been told not to engage.”

Thomas closes his eyes for a moment and tries not to see monsters.

Movement has taken the other ship: men moving, sails unfurling, and Anne snorts. “They’re pulling up anchor,” she says. “Probably wishing they’d taken a galley. They could run faster with oars.” 

It’s jarring to hear from her. It’s not that he didn’t understand, before, that Jack and Anne are pirates. Not that he disbelieved any of their stories or doubted their crimes. But it is one thing to look at them in their plantation linens or in the Webbs’ clothes, telling stories of past deeds that take on an edge of the fantastical. Chests of gems and battles at sea. It’s another to see them here on a ship, predicting the emotions and actions of men on a threatened ship because they had seen it so many times before. Because they had sailed with Charles Vane.

If he had not been dreaming that first night on Blackbeard’s beach, then they are Thomas’s friends. But they’re James’s tacit allies, at best.              

And James has a claim on Jack and Anne’s money.

It occurs to Thomas that perhaps it’s not Blackbeard he should be worried about.

And then they’re upon them, two ships— close enough that Thomas can see the faces of the men on board. And those men have a perfect view of Anne, unmistakable with her hat and her hair and her blades, and they point. Shout.

Jack frowns back at them. “Is that Collins? He took the pardon?” he cups his hands around his mouth. “COLLINS YOU GOATFUCKER!”

The man he’s shouting at raises a middle finger.

The governor’s ship starts to turn.

“Are they following us?” Anne mutters.

Thomas looks back to Blackbeard, but the captain doesn’t pay them any notice. He’s watching the thick fog ahead, coming up at them— ten meters out, five, two, and this is it, this is it—

They enter it, and the world dulls.

The fog soaks Thomas’s clothes. He can’t see anything ahead or behind. The world has been reduced to just him, and Jack, and Anne, and rail they’re holding onto.

Time passes. Time must pass, for that’s what time does, and yet Thomas couldn’t say how much. The light doesn’t change.

 

* * *

 

 

“My palms get all tingly when there’s treasure near,” Tyson is saying.

Silver moves closer to Flint, who hasn’t joined in the search.

“Think they could be right?” Silver asks. “That it’s full of gold, not about Tyson’s palms.”

Flint shrugs. “I don’t like it,” he mutters. “If the men want to go exploring inside, there’s no telling how many we’ll lose. How much time it’ll take.” They’d spent hours in the one that killed Donovan.

“Do you have an odd feeling around it?” Silver asks. “It feels like… it’s calling to me. I don’t know if I trust that.”

“Well.” Flint smiles a little half-smile at him. “You do have a history of getting superstitious when you’re hungry.”

It doesn’t mean Silver’s wrong.

He looks out at the ocean. There’s maybe a mile of it that he can see, before it’s swallowed up by the fog. Coast and waters and… is that a ship?

He squints, wishing they’d brought a spyglass. He thinks it’s at least four ships, maybe more, approaching the island with what he would have thought was an impossible speed.

Are they residents? Are they coming back?

Maybe they’re onto something with the monolith. If they are, they need to grab what they can and—

“Got it!” someone yells. Men prepare to pull the doors up, but they swing inwards instead, making everyone jump back. 

And despite himself, Silver gets a thrill of excitement as he joins them on the edge. They’ll just go in a few steps, that’s all. Flint’s lighting the torch, and there’s still enough of it to have a quick look around.

As one, the crew leans forward.

Inside, something moves.

 

* * *

 

 

For a moment, Thomas thinks he’s fallen asleep.

And yet— R’lyeh looms before him, but Thomas can move his head, can see his hands and feet. He’s seeing it with his own eyes, not watching from the buildings, or the sky, or wherever the hell he had been watching from before. But it still _looks_ like a dream— slightly off, slightly out of proportion.

“It’s real,” Anne says quietly.

Thomas tries to swallow, but his mouth has gone dry. The waters are still, but the fear is stronger here. “Yes.” It comes out more like a croak.

Jack takes the Bible and opens to his drawing of the skyline, comparing the two. “There’s the _Walrus,_ ” he says, pointing, although he doesn’t need to. There is only one ship waiting up ahead.

“Huh,” Blackbeard says. Thomas hadn’t realized he was there, and tries not to flinch. He’s got his glass out and is peering at the monolith. “The men up by the wall aren’t moving much.”

“Can you see them?” Thomas wants to grab for the spyglass, but one probably doesn’t do that around Blackbeard. Instead he waits, tapping on the rail, as Blackbeard hands the glass to Anne. They’re there. The _Walrus_ is there, which means James is there. He’s real and he’s close and he doesn’t know he might be about to die.

“Must be the time thing,” Anne says. “I reckon the closer we get, the fast they’ll look to move.”

Blackbeard frowns. “Then we should stay back. Gives us more time to react if something happens. You can go get the men in the longboats.”

“We?” Jack asks.

“You’re the ones that wanted to get them. So go get them.” He looks back over his shoulder. “Ready two launches! Raise the black, prepare to turn us around, and signal the fleet and the _Walrus_ to do the same! We’re going to want to leave quickly!”

Most of the crew is standing frozen, gaping at the city. At Blackbeard’s order they seem to remember themselves, but only a few spring to action. He shouts again, and slowly, the others follow.

Will the _Walrus_ see them, and come towards them? Will they stay and wait for their captain and quartermaster, and the rest of their crew? If they’ve already been waiting for a couple days, they may jump at the chance for any news. Or perhaps James’s crew mistrusts Blackbeard as much as Blackbeard seems to mistrust James.

Jack looks to Anne, and then to Thomas, and then back at the monolith. Thomas now can just see something near the bottom that might be the men— it’s hard to tell when they’re not moving.

But whoever gets in the boats will experience time as it is on R’lyeh, where they may be only minutes away from horrific deaths.

He opens his mouth, but it takes a moment to get the words out. “I’ll go. You two can stay.”

“There’s thirteen men up there, if you counted right. We’ll need two boats,” Anne says. “Jack and I go.”

But James is there, _James is there_ and he may not be for long. And Thomas is ashamed for thinking it, but he thinks about Jack and the treasure anyway— about how easy it would be for anything here on out to look like an accident—

“Have you ever rowed a boat in your life?” Jack asks.

“Yes.” Once. “I don’t recall it taking an excess of skill.”

Jack and Anne look at each other. “We’re going,” Jack agrees.

“But—”

Jack closes the Bible and hands it back to him. “Can you trust me?”

Can he? Thomas wants to, considering what they’ve been together. He trusts Jack with his own life, certainly. He just doesn’t know about James’s.

If Jack’s offended by the hesitation, he doesn’t show it. “You have my word,” he says. “I’ll bring him back.”

Thomas bites the inside of his cheek. “Go.” 

They start squeezing away through the awestruck men, climbing into the launches. They’re lowered over the side.

“You just knew him for a few months, did you,” Blackbeard says, and it takes Thomas a moment to realize he’s the one being spoken to.

“I never lied to you.”

“No,” the captain says. “No, I suppose you didn’t.”

They both watch as Jack and Anne start rowing, fast as they can.

There’s movement on their left.

Thomas blinks at the other ship, wondering why it’s not adjusting its sails like the rest of them, when he realizes that it’s not part of Blackbeard’s fleet. It’s the governor’s ship, still following them, lost between the others in the fog, and still pressing forward. It’s not moving very fast, but surely it must be faster than Jack or Anne can row.

“Shit,” he mutters.

Blackbeard strides past him. “Speaking trumpet!” he shouts, and someone gets him one. It’s enough to wonder if there are crewmen whose jobs constitute standing around with various items and waiting for the captain to request them. He stands up by the rail. The governor’s ship is nearly passing them now, they won’t be able to come to a stop, but Blackbeard shouts at them to do so anyway.

“Stop your approach, or we will be forced to fire.”

The sloops behind them, aided by oars, have are already on their way to turning. The _Revenge_ is angled away from the governor’s ship, broadside facing the island. They aren’t in a position to fire upon the ship, but if it doesn’t stop, if they try and intercept Jack and Anne, or if Jack and Anne get James and then they’re all captured— Thomas doesn't know what might happen after that. 

Jack and Anne are almost to the beach, now.

And that’s when the ground shakes.

 

 

 


	7. Unhallowed Blasphemies from Elder Stars

_I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea_

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

 

Something is glowing, slit shaped and bright red and it takes Silver a second to reconcile that into an eye. And then there’s another one, and for a moment, the eyes stare at the pirates, and the pirates stare at the eyes.

The eyes blink, and then just one opens, and then both of them, and they blink again. It’s hard not to get the impression that the eyes are as surprised to see them as they are to see the eyes.

And then they start to rise.

Something is standing up.

“Run!” Flint shouts, and Silver turns with the rest but they’re quickly ahead of him. He’d thought, foolishly, that they had been on level ground compared to the doors and the wall by the beach, but either whatever body the eyes are attached to is moving the entire monolith or the platform just made a steep tilt downward. Silver gets his hands on the top of the wall, locking his elbows as the ground falls away from under him.

_Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck—_

He swings hauls himself over the side, metal leg catching in a crack in the stone and twisting— he yells, and then he’s over, hitting the bank and landing on—

“Paxton?!”

“Fuck—!” They roll a few feet before they manage to untangle from each other.

“Silver!” Flint’s partway down the hill, facing them. Facing whatever’s behind them, and Silver doesn’t dare turn around. Instead he starts scooting down the steep bank on his arse, sharp rocks tearing at his pants, shouting at Paxton to follow.

But Paxton has stood, and he’s stumbling forward when something too big to be a claw but too clawed to be anything else grabs him around the middle.

“Paxton!” Silver grabs his flailing hand and pulls, but he can barely see a fraction of whatever is chasing them. He can’t even understand what’s chasing them— it’s all got the air of a nightmare but it’s sharp and painfully real— the claw squeezes Paxton tighter, and even with the men screaming and the ground shaking, Silver can hear his ribs crack. And Paxton’s hand is yanked out of Silver's and he goes flying, somewhere back over the wall. Silver can’t hear the crunch of his body hitting the ground, but he feels it in his bones.

“Silver!” Flint shouts again. He’s got his pistol out and for a second he thinks Flint is going to kill him, is going to put him out of his misery before the shadow over his shoulder can crush him—

Flint fires.

Silver flinches.

The bullet goes somewhere over his head, and the shadow pulls back. It’s enough to keep Silver sliding.

The men on the beach are all running to the shore, where two longboats have landed. The timing is too coincidental, and maybe whoever it is are allies of whatever is behind them, but maybe they’re not, and it’s a chance at least some of the men have chosen to take because one of the boats leaves shore. There’s a ship coming closer, but Silver can’t make out what banner it’s flying. It’s fine. If they get taken prisoner, he’ll get them out of it. He can’t do that if he’s been crushed to nothing.

_How is this real how is this real—_

Silver’s foot hits sand and he gets to his feet. Scraped skin stinging, hand on his sword, and this time when the shadow comes he turns, slashing out.

It must not be expecting pain, because again, it hesitates. Silver can’t see how tall it is without looking up, but he doesn’t have time to look up— his metal leg doesn’t do well in sand, and he wishes, again, for his crutch. 

Flint is standing by one of the boats, gesturing, but Silver can’t hear what he’s saying over the pounding in his ears. Almost there— almost there— but he’s sliding in the sand and it’s getting closer.

If they wait for him, they’re all going to die.

“Go!” Silver tries to shout. Tries to wave them on. “Go—”

And then his feet are off the ground and he stabs at the leathery-thick claw that’s starting to squeeze him. Below, Flint grabs Dooley’s gun and aims but Silver’s already falling.

He’s thrown forward a bit, landing right next to the boat. His bad leg takes the force of it, hurting like it hasn't since they first cut it off. It takes everything he has not to scream. 

Something has grabbed him again, and he tenses, but they're hands, they're human hands, and he’s getting pulled into the boat, crushing Tyson and Joji in the process. Someone is firing a gun right over his head, and Flint’s on the sand, pushing them forward, and then leaping back in— 

“Get down!” shouts Jack Rackham.

What the fuck?

But there he is, oars in hand, and Flint and Dooley duck down into the pile of men and a cannonball is flying over their heads.

The creature screeches, and so does Rackham— “Row, you useless sons of shits!”

Slowly, the men disentangle themselves, grabbing at the extra oars. Silver sits up, and, finally, gets a good look at what’s been chasing them.

Huge doesn’t describe it properly. The monolith had been the biggest thing for miles, and yet how it could have contained such a creature is beyond him. It seems to be made of darkness itself, with long, sweeping arms, a tentacled face, and—

The creature from the carvings, the ones that had so frightened all of them, spreads its wings.

Wingtip to wingtip it covers half the island. They won’t be able to escape this, not if it can fly. Nobody will be able to escape. The war— Nassau—it doesn’t matter anymore, because even fucking England, and Spain, and France and Portugal and the Netherlands and all their armies combined won’t be able to touch it.

When the monster’s foot hits the water, it sends out a wake strong enough to push them forward. 

There’s another round of cannon fire, and it’s coming from more than one direction. Silver makes himself look away from the creature, and finally identifies the banner of the closest ship.

“You brought the fucking governor?!” he demands.

“No, I brought Captain Teach. The governor’s ship intercepted and then followed us.” 

“How did you—”

The cannons fire again. The cannons are coming faster, faster than Silver would have thought possible, and the monster hesitates.  All that time sleeping, dwelling, whatever it had been doing— it doesn’t seem quite oriented to the outside, and it really doesn’t seem to like pain.

It lunges forward, reaching out those long arms. But instead of going for their boat, it picks up the ship.

Silver tries not to listen to the screams.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a special kind of horror in seeing everything move slowly.

Thomas can just barely see the figures running, or trying to run— It takes nearly a minute for Cthulhu to reach out, even though for the men there it must be seconds. And Thomas stands, unable to warn them, unable to let them experience time as he does, giving them the chance for escape.

“What in the devil—” gasps one of the pirates, and Thomas can’t answer him. Even as they’d passed through the fog, he’d thought maybe they could get James away in time, could keep them from the monolith. He’d thought maybe he could go the rest of his life, with just enough doubt about Old Castro’s story to let him sleep at night.

But now—

Cthulhu is still emerging, and he’s already big enough to cast a distorted shadow visible from the water. And there's still more of him coming, still climbing out of the monolith— a head with strange tentacles coming from the bottom half. A wing. A claw.

“Ready the guns!” Blackbeard shouts

Guns, against a god.

Thomas been afraid before.

He doesn’t know what he is now.

The man next to him mutters a prayer.

“We need to get out of here,” another says, “we need to get out of here before it gets to us—”

Thomas tears his eyes from the monster to look at Blackbeard, to think _don’t leave them here._ The captain doesn’t meet his eye.

“You think we can outrun that? No. If any of you are too cowardly to stand and fight it like men, you can jump over the side.”

But threats may not hold them, not when Cthulhu grabs one of the fleeing men, and Thomas finds himself praying too, praying to any god out there that’s not the one in front of him. _Please don’t be James. Please don’t be James._

“Hold until it’s in range,” Blackbeard says through the trumpet, “And then fire! Aim well over the longboats!” Anne’s boat is launching, moving to Thomas’s eyes like the sea is made of molasses. He’s useless, he’s _useless_ here, and he’s never ached for the ability to do great violence until this second.

But at least Cthulhu is moving slowly as well. He snatches another man from near the beach— a second man stops and fires, and the first man falls— he’s near the boat, and maybe they get him in, maybe he’s dead, because Jack’s boat is moving as well.

“Fire!” Blackbeard shouts, and the call echoes in other men’s voices down the line of ships. Thomas might not like him, but he has to admire him. He doubts the king of England could make men hold a line in the face of this.

The _Revenge_ still hasn’t completed her turn— they’ve stopped with their broadside facing the island. The sloops are firing off guns from their sterns, but they’re ready to flee.

All of them are in a better position than the governor’s ship.

They don’t even seem to notice Jack and Anne rowing past. They don’t have many guns, and they don’t have time to turn around. Cthulhu flinches at the first volley of cannon, but he leans forward, picking up the ship by the mast.

It takes a moment for Thomas to realize that what he’s watching are men falling, impossibly slowly, from a sideways ship.

Blackbeard raises an arm. “Hold!”

Anne steers her boat in one direction, and Jack in another, both trying to get out of the way.

A cannon fires from the ship, now high in the air.  Maybe an accident, maybe the last act of a man close to a monster’s face— whatever it is seems to make Cthulhu reel backwards, dropping the ship. It lands half on the beach, half in the water. The sound that reaches the _Revenge_ is a long, slow crunch.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Men fall around them, screaming—  “Left, left,” Rackham yells, and they narrowly avoid a piece of mast. In the water, the governor’s men flail, and Silver realizes some of them can’t swim.

He doesn’t know if he can swim anymore, either.

He recognizes members of Hornigold’s old crew in the water, and grits his teeth, because if they try to save all of them they’ll never get out of here.

The men who can swim are coming towards them, probably making the same calculation Silver did earlier: better human enemies than ones that can pick up ships. Or perhaps they’re too terrified to think that far.

“Keep going,” Flint says. He looks back, too. He must have known these men as well, but that doesn’t mean he regrets them.

One gets a hand on the edge of their boat, clinging. “Please,” he begs.

“He’s slowing us down,” Dooley warns.

Silver reaches for his gun to give him a quick death, but it had gotten lost sometime in the chase. “For fuck’s sake,” he sighs, and then gets a grip on the man’s arm. Flint raises an eyebrow, but after a second he grabs the man by the shoulder and slings him in, letting him bang into Silver and Joji in the process.

“Thank you,” the man gasps. “Thank you—”

Silver frowns down at the man now half in his lap. “That you, Collins? Jesus Christ.”

The cannonballs still seem to be coming especially fast, more than Silver can imagine any ship being able to fire. Perhaps Teach has some untold of discipline, but if he does, it’s extended to the _Walrus_ as well. Even with a third of their men gone, the reports come every couple seconds.

The second rowboat has gotten turned away from them— they’re at one of Teach’s ships, and Silver can make out men scrambling up the side before another volley goes past and he has to blink.

But they’ll run out of ammo eventually, and they can’t sail away if they’re trying to aim.

“How did you find us?” Flint shouts.

“It’s a long fucking story,” Rackham says. The boat shakes.

The _Walrus_ is looming up behind them, and the cannons are slowing. With another heave, they push the boat alongside the ship.  There are shouts from above, and then someone drops a ladder.

Joji looks at Silver, but Silver waves him on.

The creature isn’t approaching as quickly as it could. Is it the cannons? The cannonballs can’t be bigger than pellets to it, but then, a bullet isn’t all that bigger than a pellet to a man.

Silver shifts out of the way as the men climb out.

“What do you mean, a long story?” Flint asks, crouching by Rackham, out of the way of the exodus.

And though Silver is curious about the answer, he’s more invested in sailing the fuck out of here before the monster stops being confused and starts getting really, really pissed.

“Go, Jack,” he says.

Rackham looks between them for a second, and then climbs after Tyson, with Collins hot on his heels. Presumably trying to find safety before they throw him overboard.

Coward.

“Your turn,” Flint says.

“You’re faster—”

Flint grabs his arm and half throws him at the ladder, and that’s stupid, really. Silver’s gotten good at mostly pulling himself up with his arms, yes, but Flint could still do it in half the time. Yet there’s no time to waste arguing. If they die, at least he’ll die on the _Walrus._ The ship that’s only recently started feeling like some kind of home.

He swings himself onto the deck the way he had over the wall, but this time he lands on his feet. Flint jumps down next to him. Silver doesn’t know which ship the longboat belongs to, but there’s no time to try and save it. De Groot is standing at the helm, shouting their names, and Rackham is already next to him, gesturing about something.

Now that he can actually look, Silver sees that the cannonballs he’d thought were coming so fast seem to be slowing down the closer they get to the monster.

“Why are they doing that?” he has to shout over the noise.

“The closer you are to the island, the slower time runs,” Rackham says.

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you lot have been missing for three months.”

What?

Flint turns to him. “We were there barely over two days.”

“You woke Cthulhu and you want to talk to me about insane?”

“What’s—”

“That,” Rackham points. “That’s Cthulhu.”

“Great,” Flint says. “It has a name. What the hell _is_ it, and how do we stop it?”

“It’s something called an Old One. It’s from space.”

“Space.”

“Does that part really matter right now?”

This is real. This is real just like that city was real. It’s real and it’s just another thing to fight. Another opponent with patterns of behavior. “He flinches back, at the huge volleys,” Silver says. “We could drive him back onto the island, maybe back into the monolith.”

“The only advantage we have is time.” Flint shakes his head as he says it, but Silver’s not going to quibble over how ridiculous Rackham’s theory of time is. He knows the trajectory of a cannonball. He knows the monster wasn’t that slow when it snatched Paxton from his side.

“Then we keep a distance,” Silver realizes. “We fire at it, we sail at it, we do whatever we can. If the others get outside the fog, and we slow this thing down for an hour, that’ll give them a few days to plan, right? Warn people, before it gets out.” Madi and Maroon Island aren’t too far from here. This thing could take them out with a sweep of its wing, if it got going. And Nassau isn’t far from Maroon Island and while Silver doesn’t have any friends left there, he might regret Max’s death.

He might regret the whole world, if it— Cthulhu— keeps moving.

Flint turns to look at him. For a man who’s tried to die at least three times since Silver has known him, he looks remarkably put off by the concept. “We might not have an hour.”

“Then we give them what we can.” Silver wants to hold Flint’s hand, or his arm, or anything at all, but the only contact he gets away with is brushing their elbows as they turn to look. “We let this thing out, didn’t we?”

It’s not just him he’s condemning. It’s his men. Joji, Howell, Tyson, Dooley. And men who did nothing but wait for them, like De Groot, who’s looking at him with something like resignation. But you don’t become a pirate, you don’t join a war to live a long life.

“ _I_ didn’t let it out,” Rackham mutters. Then— “Well, actually,” and then he doesn’t say anything else.

“Something to add?” Silver asks.

Rackham takes a breath. “No,” he says, after a few seconds. “But, Flint—”

“What.”

Under the weight of Flint’s gaze, Rackham hesitates. He looks from Flint to Blackbeard’s flagship then back again, face crumpled. He wants to be with Anne, Silver guesses. “I— There’s—” and he looks back to where Cthulhu is starting to advance again. “Never mind.” He turns away, but Silver catches him saying something like “Forgive me.”

If Flint made a move like this without Silver— well, Silver has no great love for Anne Bonny, but he would never wish this for her.

“Someone could take the longboat and relay the plan to Teach,” he says.

Rackham turns back to him, eyes alight for a moment, before he shakes his head. “No. No, I…” it seems as though there’s some sin on the tip of his tongue, and Silver waits, but all he says is, “it would take time and manpower to ready it that we don’t have. And many of the men might break ranks to try and come with me. Better not have the distraction. Teach is smart, he’ll figure out what we’re doing.”

It’s more than he’s ever expected from Jack Rackham, and Silver wonders for a second just what’s happened these last few months, but he doesn’t have time.

And then there’s a hand on his— Flint’s reached for him after all, squeezes his hand hard for a second, before letting go and marching down the deck.

“Hold fire! Lower the sails!” he bellows, waving Joji aside and putting a hand on the wheel. “Steer to the beach! Dooley, signal Teach’s fleet to retreat.”

The men near him fall silent, looking from him to the flag in confusion. Dooley scrambles over to the pole, lowering it to three-quarters height.

Silver steps forward. “We’re giving Teach time to organize an attack on the other side of the fog, when it comes after them,” he says, voice carrying more now that the only firing is from the other ships. “We’re giving him time to warn the surrounding area.” He looks to the men. His men. His men who promised to take care of him, who he promised to take care of. He’s selected them for death before, but never quite like this.

He hopes someone will tell Madi and Billy what became of them.

“A merry life, and a short one,” Silver continues. “The end of our lives lay at a noose, but we’ve avoided that fate. Instead, we get to spit in the face of the goddamn devil.” The yell that goes up is somewhat hollow, but Silver can’t blame them. It’s not his best work.

He’s not quite ready to die, either.

“Bow end— ready all the chain shot you can,” Flint barks. “If he reaches for us, aim for the claws. Stern end— once we get in close, go for the inside of the wings. He’ll be moving a lot faster as we get closer, but if he starts to fly we’re all fucked, so be ready.” Flint turns back to the wheel, pulling it hard to one side. Cthulhu picks up a piece of the governor’s fallen ship, throwing it at one of Blackbeard’s sloops— it only has enough time to try to get out of the way, but not enough time to be successful, and Silver looks away, because there’s nothing he can do about it. His time is looking damn short as it is.

He squeezes back through the throng of men to Flint.

“My one regret,” he says, “is that we don’t get to die on a full stomach.”

“Given a few extra minutes we might have been able to scrounge up a shark for you.” Flint smiles a little as he says it, and fuck it, and fuck everyone— every man’s eyes are on his gun, his ammo, or Cthulhu, so Silver grabs Flint by the shirt— dark brown like his own, when had they started dressing the same, how long have they been burrowing into each other’s heads— and kisses him. Tries to convey his real regrets in two seconds of contact, and then pulls away, because Flint has to steer and he has to rally the men and this is it.

“Better to die on the ship than in that fucking city,” Silver says. This was more how he imagined it. Shoulder to shoulder with Flint, facing impossible odds.

Flint smiles that smile Silver had last seen over a chest of buried treasure. The smile that says, _bring it on._

Silver smiles back.

 

* * *

 

 

“Flint’s signaling us to retreat!” one of the men shouts. Thomas turns to look at the _Walrus_ , because they don’t look like they’re retreating, unless 'retreat' is pirate code for 'press forward on the enemy.'

“He’s not retreating,” he says. Blackbeard looks like he’s about to say something, but that’s when a piece of the governor’s ship comes towards them. Slow at first, then faster and faster— It goes to their left, hitting the side of the sloop. It spins and tilts from impact, and a scream goes up as a handful of men are thrown overboard.

“Prepare to retreat!” Blackbeard shouts, and Thomas elbows a man out of the way to get closer to him.

“Flint’s _not_ retreating,” he repeats.

Blackbeard glances once to the _Walrus._ “He’s buying us time. He’s going to slow down Cthulhu here, so we’ll have days to prepare a counterattack on the other side of those cliffs.”

For men who claim to be at odds, they understand each other perfectly well.

“They’ll die!”

“We’ll all die, otherwise.” Blackbeard pushes off from the rail, and Thomas grabs his arm.

“Jam— Jack is on that ship,” he says, and it’s cruel, it’s fucking cruel, they’ve come all that way and now he’s going to lose not only James but Jack. And Anne’s over on the _Adventure_ and if the fleet scatters he’ll lose her too. It’s not fair and it’s not fair, but when the fuck has that ever mattered? He knows better. He’s not a damn child.

He’d always known this was a possibility.

He just didn’t think he’d have to watch James sail to his death to save the rest of them.

“I’m sorry,” Blackbeard says, and he sounds like he means it.  “But we mourn later.” He doesn’t care that every man who knows the location of the treasure is about to die, but he’d mostly wanted that to spite Jack, hadn’t he? And now—

Cthulhu chooses that moment to pick up another piece of wreckage, and, and, God, this one has men in it, at least two, clinging to the side. They’ve been alive this whole time and they’re screaming those slow, warped sounds of a slower time.  Cthulhu tosses them, timber and all, into his mouth, and the crunch makes Thomas’s ears rattle.

“He eats men,” he says. “He eats ships.” And he doesn’t like fire.

“Exactly.” Blackbeard yanks himself away at last.

The cannon fire is petering out as the ships turn, and Thomas looks at the powder. Remembers what Blackbeard said about the last time his men sailed against an unbreakable force.

He’s going to die no matter what, isn’t he? He’s going to die if they wait out there, he’s going to die if Cthulhu is freed. He’s been dead for ten years now.

And if he’s going to go—

Miranda is dead. His mother is dead. James is about to be dead, and there’s no future he wants where all those things are true. If she doesn’t die next week on the other side of the cliffs, Anne will still have her woman in Nassau. She won’t need Thomas’s grief to brace against her own.

She can live.

Maybe James can live, too.

Thomas hopes Jack hasn’t had the chance to tell James he’s alive.

“How much powder can you spare?” he asks.

 

* * *

 

 

One swipe of Cthulhu’s hand takes out the top of their front mast, but chain shot around one of his— fingers? Talons? Claws?— diverts him. Silver looks, but he can’t look enough places at once. Like the monolith, Cthulhu blocks out everything else.

Flint is calling out orders from the quarterdeck, still on his feet even as the ship sways. Joji’s taken the wheel, fighting to hold them in place, but Cthulhu kicks out and they spin a little, and a chunk gets taken from the bow—

An hour, Silver had said, how stupid was he? Cthulhu isn’t a slow ship manned by tired men. They can’t hold up against it for an hour: they barely have the advantage of time anymore. All they have is Cthulhu flinching back from the assault on his hands and wings and feet before rearing forward again.

Silver wonders, between them, who is having a worse day.

At least Teach has listened to them and retreated— when he glances back he can see the five ships, including the listing sloop, getting smaller in the distance. They look like they’re sailing very fast, from here. He wonders if the men on board are looking back as well. If they’re going to be watching them die for hours.

But—

Something’s coming towards them. A longboat. Anne? But it’s not Anne, there’s a man in it— no, there’s two boats, one farther behind the first, and the second one looks like it might be Anne, so who’s in the first?

“Jack!”

Rackham’s up on the poop deck, holding a sword like he’s ready to fight Cthulhu hand to hand. Silver has to scramble up there, listing on his false leg.

God, it hurts.

“Jack!”

He turns, and he must see the boats as well because his eyes widen, face tightening in what looks like dismay.

The ship rocks again, and Silver nearly falls on top of him. “See that?!” he shouts, pointing. “What?”

Rackham leans over the deck rail. “Glass!” he shouts. “I need a glass!” And then he leans backwards, flinching as one comes spinning towards his head. Silver is just able to catch it, extending it to try and get a look at the boat.

“It’s full of tarpaulin,” he says. “What would he need to stay dry— oh, my god.”

“Powder.” Rackham gets it at the same time. “It’s full of powder.” He grabs the glass and squints through it, and when he looks back to Silver he’s got another weird expression on his face.

Silver wishes he were going to live long enough to hear Rackham’s story, to know what it is he’s so obviously not telling them. But they don’t have time.

Rackham bounds down the steps with a speed Silver envies. “There’s a man rowing a fireboat,” he yells, and Silver hurries to keep up with him. “If we time our attack—”

Flint meets them at the foot of the stairs, reaching out to catch Silver’s shoulder. A wave crashes over them, raised by a giant wing, and the men fling themselves over the powder stores as the water comes down.

“He’ll wait until the last second,” Rackham says. “If we time it right—”

“We can hit him all at once,” Flint finishes. “If it picks the boat up, we go for the feet, if it doesn’t we stay at the wings—” They watch as the man gets closer, and Silver turns, ordering the men to hold their fire.

They have very little to fire. Down on the end, De Groot is loading the canon with debris. It’s little more than grape shot, but it’ll have to do.

 

* * *

 

 

He rows.

It’s not as hard as Jack and Anne had made it out to be. He’s not a sailor, he’s not a pirate, but he’s been beating sugar cane and swinging a scythe for years and that’s given him more than enough muscle to move a boat.

Thomas can just make out Anne’s hair on the _Adventure,_ rushing to the bow, and he sighs.

When he’s not facing Cthulhu, the scene is almost peaceful. Ships sailing towards a foggy horizon.

When he looks over his shoulder, it’s screaming hell.

The _Walrus_ is dangerously close to Cthulhu, now. They’re firing at the wings, and it’s got Cthulhu rearing backwards. As he swings an arm forward something wraps around one of his fingers, and he makes a noise that leaves Thomas’s whole body ringing in horror for a moment after.

But he moves. He moves and he moves and he tries not to think about how much this is going to hurt because he and pain have become old friends over the past ten years.

Compared to having James and Miranda ripped away from him, this is nothing.

This is nothing.

The _Walrus_ is drawing most of the attention, which is good for now because it lets him get closer. There’s an oil lamp wedged in between his feet, and if it gets knocked over too early he’s going to die like an idiot. But he’ll need Cthulhu to look at him eventually.

It had seemed like such a far distance to row, when he watched Jack and Anne do it.

It doesn’t seem far at all, now.

He’s in the monster’s shadow.

This might not save James. It might not save Jack. But it might save Anne, and it might save Henry back at the plantation, with his sculptures and theories. It might save Peter’s daughter, wherever she ended up. It might save a planet that had turned its back on him.

And it might save Thomas, from having to face a future where he didn’t make this choice.

He’s been spotted.

One of Cthulhu’s long claw arms is coming for him, and for a second the curled talons are all he sees. He’s glad he never saw the rest of Cthulhu in his dreams, or he may never have found the resolve to start this journey in the first place. He has one second to think, _please,_ and then the claw has curled around the entire boat and he’s going up, up— the ships are growing tiny and he can see the Walrus below them, he thinks he can see Jack for a moment but then he’s gone and all Thomas can see is gray sky.

Cthulhu holds him steady, and Thomas looks into his eyes. The tentacles are moving around the monster’s chin, steadying the boat, and his eyes look out into forever. Thomas wonders, for a second, what the hell he’s doing, saving humanity, when this creature was here first. Cthulhu knows more, he’s seen more: this is a being from the stars and what has humanity ever, ever done to deserve this planet anyway?

There’s another chorus of shouts from below, and Thomas thinks of James. Of Odysseus with a hot poker. He holds the lantern tight, and he waits.

And then there’s a jaw unhinging, and that can’t be a mouth, because it’s the size of a cave. But they aren’t stalagmites, they’re teeth, and Thomas tosses back the tarpaulin and tips the lantern. Recoiling on instinct from the mouth in front of him, he tries to throw himself backwards but his right arm is caught in the tarpaulin and then it’s searing agony and Cthulhu is making that noise again, louder and more terrible, and Thomas is falling, and Thomas is falling, and his side is on fire and he thinks, _point your toes, point your toes, point your toes—_

And as he falls he sees James—

 

* * *

 

 

Silver gapes as the first launch goes up, up, with the man still inside.

Flint’s watching it as well, mouthing words to himself— counting, maybe— and then— “FIRE!” 

Just as the cannons go off, the boat up in the air explodes. Cthulhu makes that sound again, a rasping screech that makes the men cower with their hands over their ears, but there’s no escaping it, because it’s in his head, his bones, his lungs, he can’t breathe for it—

And then it’s quiet, save for pitter patters like rain on the deck.

Silver looks up, and it takes a moment to realize that it’s not rain. It’s bits of slime, each one stinking like nothing he’s ever known, splattering down on them.

It takes another moment of staring at the island to understand that he can see it now, because Cthulhu has exploded.

There’s a dark patch in the water and washing up on the beach. Living on a pirate ship has made Silver immune, he thought, to bad smells, but this is something else. Tyson starts choking, and Silver can’t exactly give the order to start cleaning it up, not when there’s men injured and they have to be sailing out of here, but god damn it’s rancid—

“Oh my god,” Rackham says. “Oh my god—” he dashes back up to the poop, and Silver follows him. “Anne?”

He’d nearly forgotten—

Silver looks out just in time to see a streak of red dive out of that second boat and disappear into the muck.

“Anne!” Rackham yells again, and starts to take off his coat, but Silver grabs his arm.

“She’s going to have a hard enough time finding whoever she’s looking for,” he says. He doesn’t see how the man in the boat could have been alive when he hit the water, if he hadn’t been blasted to pieces, but he hadn’t been watching. “We don’t need to look for you too!” But Rackham’s fear is catching, even as Silver tries to breathe, tries to tell himself _we’ve won_ because it doesn’t quite feel like it just yet, not until—

“Come on,” Rackham is muttering, “Come on, Anne—”

The water is still.

“I’m going in there.” And Silver can’t stop him, doesn’t have any reason except the stench, but then there’s motion and Anne’s head breaks the surface, a few feet away from the edge of the slime.

She’s gasping, one hand flailing above the water, and a second later the man’s head appears. Silver can’t tell if he’s conscious, can’t tell if he’s alive, but Anne must think so because she’s dragging him along with her, trying to get to where her boat is waiting.

Rackham’s head drops between his arms. He’s shaking, and Silver thinks he might be crying and he has no idea what to do about that, but his face seems dry when he straightens. “Alright,” he says, and he gives Silver another one of those looks. “Alright. Alright.”

They watch as Anne gets one elbow over the edge of the boat. She seems to be having trouble getting the man inside of it, as both of them bob up and down for a couple minutes. Rackham seems to have faith in her abilities, though— he squares his shoulders and leans out over the stairs. “Flint!” he shouts. “A word!”

Flint’s straining, trying to brace a cannon as Dr. Howell slides Tyson out from under it. “Right now?”

“Urgently.”

“Right.” Flint must read something on Rackham’s face, because he shouts at De Groot to start getting them out of here. Anne’s got the man in the boat, now. She’s rowing back to the ship, covered head to toe in slime.

She had left Teach’s ship to follow that man. Dived in the water to find him when by all accounts he should be dead.

They’ve just defeated a monster, but this moment feels almost as important. They’re balanced on the edge of some great shift.

Flint goes up the stairs two at a time. “What is it?”

“I have to tell you something,” Rackham says, “before Anne reaches us, and I need you to stay calm about it.” He looks at Silver, and kind of tilts his head like Silver should leave, but that’s not how this works. 

“Nothing good has ever started like that,” Flint says.

“It’s good! I mean, it might be good— depending—” Rackham looks back to the boat, then to Flint, then Silver, and visibly steels himself. “The man in the boat is Thomas Hamilton.”

If it’s a shock to Silver, Flint goes entirely still. There’s a cut on his forehead dripping past his eye, but he doesn’t wipe it away. It’s like the name has taken away his ability to breathe.

“Thomas Hamilton is dead,” Silver says, after several seconds like this. He attributes the feeling in his stomach to the stench around him, and the battle they’d just finished. The way his world has changed. “He’s been dead for years.”

“He’s not. I mean— I mean, I don’t know, he might be, he just blew himself up,” Rackham’s hand is shaking, “but he was alive and well five minutes ago.”

“No,” Flint says. He barely moves his mouth. The blood’s hit his cheek, and Silver clenches his fist so he doesn’t clean it off himself.

Rackham tells them jumbled story of arrest, of a plantation full of inconvenient men. “He knows you, Flint. He knew things— he told us about Miranda—”

Thomas had made him freeze, but Miranda’s name sends a jolt of anguish across Flint’s face. “Everyone in London society knew about me and Miranda. Fucking Richard _Guthrie_ knew.”

“And you and Thomas?” Rackham looks to Silver and away when he says it, lowering his voice. “He told us that you threw his father out of his house, that the three of you were all partial to Aurelius, that Miranda seduced you in a carriage, that you—”

“Stop.” Flint wipes the blood away at last, looking over their shoulders to where Anne has almost reached them.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Rackham says, “so you would be prepared, before you saw him.”

“And he might be dead.”

“That wasn’t supposed to happen, that should never have happened.”

Flint stares at him. “If you’re lying to me,” he says, “I’m going to throw you in that stinky pit.” And then he turns and storms down the steps, leaning over the rail to watch Anne’s approach.

“I’m not lying,” Rackham says quietly. “I didn’t— God, if he’s dead—”

Rackham is friends with this man. Anne Bonny is friends with the man. What a man he must be. And he’s got to live, because if Thomas Hamilton dies for Flint, so close to seeing him again, Silver doesn’t know if Flint will survive it.

“I believe you,” he says. He doesn’t know what could have prompted them to come up with such a story in the first place were it not true. Today he saw time slow down. Today he saw a creature from Hell.

This morning, he’d woken up with Flint next to him, a distance off from a tunnel. He’d fought with Paxton, they’d opened the Monolith, and Paxton is dead now. Lots of men are dead now. In a word where that can happen, of course Flint’s long dead lover can appear, of course Rackham and Bonny will bring fucking Teach to retrieve them. 

But it hasn’t been a day, has it?

This day has taken a month.

“They’re here,” he says, and that jolts Rackham into movement. He scampers back down the steps, leaning over to help pull Anne on board. They hug, tightly, despite the blood and the slime. Silver looks at Flint, who’s got his hands on the ropes, pulling up the boat.

Does he want Silver with him, for this? Does he want to be alone?

It doesn’t matter. They aren’t alone, and they’re on a ship and the longer they stay here, the more days pass where Teach is waiting for him. Silver starts down the steps. The men need him, the injured need to be moved, and the slime—

The slime is moving.

Of its own accord, it begins sliding towards the beach, up the sides of the ship and then into the sea.

“Shit.”

“Is he reforming?” Anne demands. “Can he do that?” She looks back to the figure in the boat like he’s going to explain, but he’s not moving. Flint swats away a man who tries to help, carefully lifting laying him on the deck.

His right arm is blackened up to just past the elbow. Silver can’t even tell if it’s all there, and against his better judgment he makes his way over. Puts a hand on Flint’s arm.

Flint’s holding Thomas’s face in his hands— and it must be Thomas, for if it were anyone else Flint would have been shouting at Rackham already.

“He’s alive,” Anne says. “I checked. Didn’t hear any water.”

With shaking hands, Flint touches Thomas’s pulse.

“I’ll get Howell,” Silver says. “But— Captain— we have to get out of here.”

Flint looks up at him, and Silver thought he knew all his expressions, he must be reading this wrong. Because Flint looks absolutely devastated, and while that expression would make sense if Thomas were dead— he’s not.

That doesn’t mean he won’t be, though. Especially if Cthulhu reforms.

“You have to get us out of here,” he says again. “We’ll look after him, after the men, but if it comes back—”

“Be careful,” Flint says, his lips barely moving. Then he pulls away from Silver, marching back down the deck.

Behind them, the sludge is sort of starting to take form, but it hasn’t stopped moving. It’s creeping up the beach, up the bank, towards the monolith.

Should they wait and make sure it goes back inside? Or should they run in case it doesn’t? They’re in no shape to withstand another assault, much less launch one. But if they know what’s happening, they might be able to bring a warning.

Thomas moves his head slightly. “In his house,” he mutters, and Anne drops down next to him.

“Thomas?”

“Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” he whispers, and then goes still again.

“Thomas!” she snaps, putting her finger back on his neck.

“What the fuck is he saying?” Silver asks, and Rackham shakes his head.

“I think it means we’re safe,” he says. “It’s not coming back.”

Silver isn’t sure he’s ready to trust the mumbled words of a man missing half an arm, but this is one circumstance in which he’s willing to cede to Rackham’s opinion. He goes off to find Howell.

And trips over Briden.

He’s lying against the bottom of the stairs, chunks of wood lodged in his chest. Eyes open.

Silver bends down to close them, and then keeps walking. 

 

 


	8. The Tottering Cities of Men

_Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men._

_\- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"_

 

 

Thomas is not dead.

It’s a bit of a shock. He remembers falling, and he remembers pain, and he remembers water, but now he only feels the pain. He’s somewhere solid, but it’s moving, is it a boat? Did he land on a boat? There’s no sounds of battle, no noises, no screaming, and so he cautiously opens one eye.

Everything above him is blurry, and a wave of pain hits him, so intense he can’t breathe for a moment.

“Oh, shit,” someone says, and then there’s a face over him. Roundish, mustache, black hair, kind of smallish eyes? He thinks? It’s hard to say, because the world goes a little fuzzy for another moment when the man moves.

“Is he awake?” Someone else asks, and that’s Anne, that’s Anne’s voice, but Anne’s supposed to be gone on the _Adventure_ and Thomas forces his other eye open.

“What,” he croaks. There’s wood over him, under him, around him, inside, he’s inside a ship, he’s in the ship. Not the boat. And the man. “I know you.” He knows him, he knows him, he can’t just—

“Water,” the man says, “here,” and hands him a cup. Then he looks down at Thomas, and shakes his head before bringing the cup to near Thomas’s lips. “I’m just going to have to… pour it in.”

“What,” Thomas says again, but then he gets a mouthful of water. Alright. He’s somewhere with water. He should sit up, right? He reaches out and—

And?

“Stay calm,” the man says. “I need you to stay calm, alright?”

“What?” he’s got to say something else, but he can’t, because one of his arms just. Isn’t moving. Did he break it? It _hurts—_

“I’m sorry,” the man says. “I’ve been where you are and I’m truly sorry.” The man looks at Anne, but Anne’s looking with Thomas. Her eyebrows are pressed together, and he’s never seen her look like that.

Thomas follows their gaze to his right arm.

It’s not there.

It’s a little bit there. It ends shortly above the elbow, wrapped in a bandage.

His first thought is, _at least no one will ask me to write with my right hand again,_ and it’s so absurd that he starts to laugh. This makes the man lean away from him.

“The hell?” Anne asks.

“My hand,” Thomas says, in between snorts.

It occurs to him, probably too late, that they must have given him something for the pain that’s wearing off, because he’s dangerously close to sounding mad. He might be mad. He rowed a boat full of gunpowder to—

“Cthulhu,” he gasps. “Cthulhu, where, what—”

“He exploded,” Anne says. “You blew up his head and Flint and Silver blew up his body and I guess it was all too much for him ‘cause he exploded into slime.”

“But he— he can’t _die.”_

“He didn’t.” The man is watching him carefully. “The slime all crept back into the Monolith. We think he’s reforming.” He is, Thomas knows he is. His dreams were dark and full of motion. “But someone will have to let him out again, and it’s not going to be us. We made it out of the cliffs yesterday.” And Thomas knows this man, of course he knows this man. This is Long John Silver.  He’s been seeing him, with—

“James?”

“He’s fine. He’ll want to know you’re awake.” Silver moves like he’s going to stand, but Thomas shakes his head.

“Jack?”

“Also fine,” Anne says.

Thomas wonders how long it’s been, where Blackbeard is, but he can’t seem to form a proper thought anymore. “I think I’m going back to sleep,” he says, only when he moves his vision whites out with pain from his arm—

He only has one _arm—_

That’s fine, that’s going to be fine, he’ll deal with that later, he thinks, and he closes his eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

Walking about the ship is a lot harder when they haven’t cleared all the debris.

The _Walrus_ is limping along, at best— they’ve made it out of the fog and back into the world, but they’re going to need repairs before they’ll be a truly functional ship again. Teach has sent two of his sloops on ahead to suss out the situation on Maroon Island, and Silver can only hope he sent his most diplomatic men.

He can only hope that there’s someone left to be diplomatic _to._

Their fight with Cthulhu had taken two weeks. Teach had been waiting by the cliffs for one. His plan, as far as it was, had involved fireships and blowing up as much of the cliffs as they could to block the way out.

Perhaps Teach could have run, but he knew there would be nowhere safe to land. Silver isn’t sure that he himself would have been stopped by that knowledge a couple years ago, and he admires Teach for it. For not cutting his losses, accepting his fate, and finding somewhere fun to die.

Silver is trying to cut losses of his own. 

Flint had been willing to step aside for Madi, and Silver will do the same. He tells himself he’s going to stay at least three feet away from Flint at all times. He’s going to be a quartermaster and he’s going to be a friend but he’s not going to be more, not until Thomas wakes up for more than three minutes. Not until Flint speaks to him. Because Silver knows what they mean to each other, and he’s not getting in the way of that.

He could.

He’s considered it.

He can’t kill Thomas. He can’t even hurt Thomas. But that doesn’t mean he can’t drive him away. If Thomas is as dedicated to Flint as Flint is to Thomas, it won’t be hard to plant the idea in Thomas’s head that he’s a liability. That he’ll distract Flint, get him hurt— Silver knows enough of how it feels to wake up short a limb, the uncertainty that follows, and he could exploit that. And if Thomas _doesn’t_ share Flint’s dedication, then a few stories about what had been done in his name should do the trick. Silver could tell those stories as reasons Thomas should stay. _He bashed a man’s head in with a cannonball. He let half his crew die. All in the name of your vision. Look at how much he loves you._ Then he could turn to Flint and say that he tried his best to make Thomas see reason.

He could even tell himself that’s in the best interests of the crew.

Silver is in Flint’s mind now as much as Flint is in his. Silver has gone to great lengths to ensure that. It’s how they lead the men, it’s how they have any hope of succeeding in this thing they started. But just with his presence, Thomas might have the power to make Flint into someone else.

For their cause, for Madi’s cause, Silver shouldn’t stand by and risk that happening.

Flint might even survive Thomas walking away from him by choice. And Silver might be able to trick Flint into not hating him afterward.

But he’d hate himself enough for the both of them.

He’s gotten what he thinks is the whole story from Jack and Anne, and he wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t spent two days or three months in a city that defied everything he knew about the world. The man they’ve described sounds fascinating, incredible, and other good things besides: it’s difficult for Silver to even resent his presence. In some ways, he and Thomas are a perfect act of balance— Silver without his left leg, Thomas without his right hand. Both lost protecting Flint and his crew, after a fashion.

All of this would be easier to deal with if Silver could sleep.

But now that he’s safe from the exhaustion of the stairs, now that he’s back to days often spent being still, he can’t close his eyes without being back in that darkness.

For a few hours, reality itself had left him.

He hears Donovan die. He hears Paxton’s accusations, and he hears Paxton’s final cry. He touches the walls of the ship and he expects them to move. He looks at the sea, and he sees a monster older than man. What is anything, compared to that?

Their war. Their lives. Much less their loves? 

And what is Silver to the men who destroyed that creature? To two men who were so in sync, even when Flint had thought Thomas ten years gone?

“I understand what you’re feeling,” Rackham had told him earlier, catching him in the corner of the mess. Silver had just glared, and Rackham had raised an eyebrow. “Happy for him, sad for you, upset that you’re sad for you when you should be happier for him, unsure of your place in the most important partnership in your life? I have some experience in this, you know.”

So Silver has heard.

“That being said,” Rackham continued, “Thomas is my friend, and Thomas is Anne’s friend, and if you do anything to hurt him we’ll both be quite cross.” One half of that threat is much scarier than the other, but Silver doesn’t bother to point that out.

“You think I’d do that?”

Rackham snorted. “The only constant in the world,” he says, “is that no one ever knows what the fuck John Silver is going to do next.”

No one but John Silver, anyway. Because he knows exactly what he has to do, and that’s why he’s crossing the deck long past dark, trying not to trip over chunks of wood and sleeping men.

He finds Flint on the forecastle deck, sitting with his back to the rail.

Silver sits down next to him. It’s a long process. He’s careful that they don’t touch.

The last time they were in the dark together like this, they couldn’t even see the stars. Silver isn’t going to miss that city, but he can miss a time when more of his crew was alive and he didn’t know that there were ancient gods ready to eat him. He can miss those two days when he could have reached out for Flint in the darkness and known that he was welcome.

“I keep expecting the distances to be wrong,” he says. “I got so used to over-correcting that I’m having to relearn how to walk.” He tilts his head back against the rail. He’ll have to relearn his place in the world, too. Where mankind fits on a planet like this. “Luckily, I have some experience in that.”

Flint doesn’t say anything.

“Your absence in your cabin has been noted,” Silver continues. If he keeps looking at Orion, it’s easier. Three stars in a row, all in balance.  “He’s only been awake for a few minutes at a time, but he asks about you.” Silence. “He has a lot of questions.”  He doesn’t even know why he stays in there. But Anne and Jack need to sleep sometimes, and Silver can’t help but be fascinated.

It’s odd, to be the one watching. He wonders if he’d sounded just as scattered after he’d lost his leg. Thomas will sometimes talk— stories, bits, nonsense— and sometimes Silver will give some back, because if Flint won’t talk to Thomas, then Silver will. If Thomas decides to stay, Silver will need to learn him as well.

If nothing else, Silver thinks that a man with three notorious pirates ready to kill for him is a man he should know better.

“He traveled all this way for you. Please just talk to him.”

“And what would I say?” Flint is so quiet that Silver can barely hear it.

“What do you mean?”

“The person he came looking for… that man died a long time ago. I don’t want…”

“Him to judge you?” Silver asks, when it’s clear Flint isn’t going to finish the thought. “Him to hate you? You think he’s going to be the same man you knew, after a decade of imprisonment, a month on the run, learning to kill?” _He killed his friend for me,_ Jack had said, and Silver had thought of Flint, crying over Gates’s body. “I believe he’ll understand you better than you think.”

“I killed his father.” The admission is fast. Pained. “Miranda and I, we tracked and killed his father in revenge, when Peter wrote us that Thomas had died.”

Silver shrugs. “I would have done the same.” He realizes what he’s said a moment later, what he’s implied, and tries to backtrack. “Men have killed each other for less. Thomas’s father had him banished, I can’t imagine they were ever close.”

“They weren’t. But— Alfred Hamilton may have been the only man who knew Thomas was alive, knew where he was. By killing him, I ensured Thomas would have been lost forever.”

“Well, he wasn’t. He’s here, now. You’ll never know what he thinks until you talk to him.”

Flint’s breath is shaky. “And if he does? Understand?”

If he does—

Silver presses his lips to the side of Flint’s head. Lingers for just a second before pulling back, because he was supposed to keep his distance. But Flint is the one who reaches out, now. He takes Silver’s hand, holding it tight in his own, and they sit there together until the sky starts to lighten.    

 

* * *

 

Thomas has slept in. He never sleeps in, but there’s the sound of men’s voices near his door, there’s the sounds of work, he’s going to be in trouble, he’s going to—

He opens his eyes, and sees the wooden ceiling of a ship.

Anne and Jack are hovering near him, and he tries not to look like he woke up confused. Although it’s not like it’d be the first time.

He closes his eyes again. 

 

* * *

 

 

Thomas wakes, and Long John Silver is staring at him. He jumps a little when Thomas opens his eyes, like he hadn’t expected, or wanted, to be caught looking.

A second later, a cup of water is thrust in his face.

Thomas drinks it, and goes back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry,” Jack says the next time Thomas opens his eyes. “I’m sorry, if I hadn’t said anything to Webb, they may not have slowed us down—”

It takes a few moments for Thomas to understand what he’s talking about. “It’s not your fault,” he croaks. Thomas had been the one to refuse to discuss Cthulhu, back at the plantation— if a few hours were all they needed, that delay was surely the bigger crime. 

The men who died are on both of them.

The men who lived are on both of them, as well.

Thomas reaches over with his left hand and clumsily pats Jack on the arm. “It’s not your fault,” he says again.

 

* * *

 

He seems to have an alternating watch of Jack and Anne— always together— or Silver. “Don’t you have better things to do?” he asks Anne once.

 It’s Jack who whispers, “We aren’t real popular here.”

“You’re the quartermaster,” he tells Silver, when he awakens later. “Don’t you have some quarters to master, or something?”

Silver shrugs. “There’s not a lot to do, at sea,” he says. “We’ll make land in a couple days.” He doesn’t sound entirely confident about what that landing will entail, but Thomas is too tired to worry about it. “I’m just giving Jack and Anne a break.”

He’s been giving Jack and Anne a lot of breaks. There are other men who could do that— one man in particular— but Thomas suspects Silver is just as curious about him as he is about Silver.  “Oh,” he says. For lack of anywhere comfortable to look, he drops his eyes to Silver’s false leg.

“Think they make something like that for arms?”

Silver huffs. “Hands, maybe,” he says. “You don’t have an elbow.”

That’s right. Thomas still feels like he has both elbows, when he’s only half awake. Sometimes he can move his right hand, before he remembers it doesn't exist.

“Where do you find something like that, on the high seas?” he asks anyway.

“Belonged to another man on the crew. Conveniently for me, he died barely half a day before I needed it.” Silver taps a spot just below his knee, where it must be strapped to what’s left of his leg. “Had to be refit, of course. But, just between you and me, you may be lucky. This thing sometimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth.” He’s probably saying it to make Thomas feel better, but maybe not. The idea of putting all that weight on his arm is almost sickening. He couldn’t do it with every step.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It seems like the thing to say.

“Laudanum?”

“Please.” Thomas hesitates a second. “Why won’t he visit?”

“Well,” Silver says.

 

* * *

 

And then, two awakenings later, James is there.

He’s sitting in the chair Silver sometimes occupies, hands clasped together under his nose.

“James,” Thomas says, and he looks up.

The dreams hadn’t lied. He’s shaved his head, his beard is a little longer, and the lines in his forehead are more pronounced. Or perhaps that’s the layer of grime no pirates seem to bother to wash off.

He’s beautiful.

Thomas reaches out his good arm, and drops it when the effort makes him dizzy. “I imagined hugging you,” he says, and laughs a little. He thinks he’s laughed more since he lost his arm than he has in the last ten years, but that might just be the delirium.

“Jesus, Thomas,” James says. He cups Thomas’s face in his hand, and Thomas still can’t quite place his expression. “You— you’re—”

Thomas catches James’s hand with his good one, holding it to his lips for a moment— and then James leans forward and presses their foreheads together.

He’s shaking.

 

* * *

 

 

“Your Silver has been in here quite a few times,” Thomas say a bit later, trying to find something to focus on that isn’t the pain in his arm.

James cringes a little. “What did he tell you?” he asks, and Thomas remembers Jack’s attempt to emulate Silver at the Webbs’ house. Silver’s words must be a powerful thing, for even his friends to be so cautious of them.

“Bits and pieces. Enough that I could come to the conclusion he wanted me to, but in a way that I almost didn’t realize he’d led me there.” It had been masterfully done. “I think that he thinks that you were terrified to face me in light of how you changed, complicated by the fact that you don’t regret your actions.”

What precisely it was that Captain Flint has done is still not entirely clear to Thomas, shrouded in legend as all the stories tend to be. Still, he reaches up to catch James’s hand again, and hold tight.

“I regret some things,” James says quietly.

“Peter?”

“No.” James’s face tightens. “Not Peter. I’m sorry.”

Thomas closes his eyes. At least the pain is keeping him awake. “Don’t be sorry. ‘Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’” He tries not to laugh again. “Hand for hand.” 

“I thought it was _turn the other cheek.”_

“Not in Exodus,” Thomas says. He’d have had a better quote, once upon a time, but most of the books he’d once read had been forgotten under doctors’ hands. “The only book I’ve had to read in years was the Bible.” That Bible is ruined, now, ink bleeding and pages stuck together with ash and seawater. A poetic ending, perhaps, to the record of their journey— and yet he hasn’t let it leave his side for so long it’s odd to be without it. “A guard got me permission to have it. I had to kill him, later.”

James touches his good arm with light fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

“I had to.” He’s like James, perhaps— not regretting the action or the outcome, but regretting that he had to do it in the first place.

“I’ve done the same,” James says.

“Jack says it’s just what happens here. Your friends become your enemies, and the only way out is by walking over them.”

“Sometimes.” Some of Thomas’s thoughts must show, because James’s face crumples. “Not people you— you know I’d never hurt you.”

Thomas knows. Even Jack must know it’s not always true, not when Max had risked so much to save him and Anne. “And Silver?”

James snorts. “I couldn’t kill Silver even when I wanted to. Can we talk about something else?”

He’d meant to ask if Silver could kill James, but he smiles instead when James’s ears turn pink. Thomas in too much pain to be truly delighted, but the beginnings of the emotion are there. “You know, we were watching you in our dreams.”

“Rackham said.” From the tone of his voice, that conversation must not have gone well. “What he didn’t tell me is how many people had them.”

“Three that I know of,” Thomas says. “But one of them is dead. Did you honestly think I’d be upset? Just because I haven’t gotten laid in ten years doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have either. And I don’t know what’s ahead of us, but there’s nothing like everyone almost dying at the hands of an Old One to put life into perspective.” He can’t shrug, so he just taps on James’s arm to make sure he’s paying close attention. “Silver is very pretty, and you, at least, have two hands.”

James stares at him in open shock for a moment. Then his lip twitches. And then he’s laughing, gasping for breath. “I forgot—” he starts, and then loses it all over again.

The door cracks open. “Everyone alive in there?” Silver asks.

The sight of him seems to send James into another round of hysteria.

Silver looks at Thomas with a question in his eyes, and Thomas nods.

 

* * *

 

The question is, what happens now?

“We’ve lost our chance to disappear,” Flint says. He’s staring just over Thomas’s head, out the window. “Teach knows we’re alive, I suppose, so the point is moot.”

“You wouldn’t have done it.” Silver props himself up against the desk and crosses his arms, trying to look confident “You wouldn’t have just sailed away.” But he could have, and this was Silver’s fear. This was the outcome Silver saw coming and didn’t do anything to stop. After talking Silver into this war, after convincing the Maroons he was a strong enough ally that they could give up their safety—

“Thomas doesn’t need to get dragged into a war.”

“I am your war,” Thomas says, sharp enough that Flint and Silver both look at him in surprise. He’s swung himself into a sitting position, resting his good arm on his knee as he leans forward. “That’s what I’ve been told.” He’s in pain. He’s doing a decent job of hiding it, too, but Silver is too intimately acquainted with that particular task to be fooled. “What they did to me, you used as justification to turn against the British Empire. Civilization. The morals and values they hold. Is that incorrect?”

Flint’s hand is shaking, and Silver wants to cover it with his own, but he doesn’t move.

“It’s not,” Flint says.

Thomas rolls his bad shoulder a little. His missing fingers must ache. “Men in London used to say the New World was a gift from God,” he says, “But I thought it was a challenge. A test. Too see if, for all our culture, for all our Enlightenment, we could do it right this time around.”

“And now?” Silver asks.

“Well, now we know that whatever they said about God is at least partially a lie, don’t we? But the New World was never about God, not even for the Spanish. It was just about men, and how to steal money. Stolen profits from stolen people.” What’s left of his right arm twitches. “The Spanish steal their silver and gold from the land and lives of the Indians. You steal the gold from the Spanish. And around and around we go.”

If he stays, he could give Billy a run for his money. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that as the one who spent the last ten years in a madhouse and as what was only marginally better than a slave, I’m just as invested in burning that system down as you are. So. What would our plan of action be?”

Flint smiles _that_ smile again, and something is burning in Silver’s gut. There he is. _There he is._

“Well,” he says, with that faint trace of arrogance Silver had missed so much in R’lyeh. “We’d first sail to Maroon Island. Dig up the cache, give Blackbeard the portion of the gems you and Rackham apparently promised him, try and keep his alliance through the fighting, find out what state the Maroons have been in since our disappearance—”

They have a jungle full of pits, and the icy determination of the queen. They couldn’t hold out forever, but three months? That they could do. “The real danger is going to be how angry is Madi at us,” Silver says.

“—let Madi yell at us, and then.” Flint spreads his hands. “Thomas. How do you feel about taking your house back from Woodes Rogers?”

“Pretty good,” Thomas says. “Silver?”

Silver lets out a put-upon sigh. “Well,” he says, “I suppose you couldn’t do it without me.”

Thomas studies him for a minute. “No.” He sounds entirely serious. “I don’t suppose we could.”

Flint turns so he’s sitting next to Thomas on the bed, pointedly shifting to the side a little. Silver looks at that spot, then back at Flint, raising an eyebrow. Flint raises one back, and so Silver thunks across the room and sits down next to them.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

* * *

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

* * *

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Some months later, the governor of New Providence Island sits in his ship’s cabin with Anne Bonny’s sword at his throat. He looks about how Thomas had expected him to look— like a desperate politician with secrets to hide and scars that he can’t.

At one point, Thomas might have been able to relate.

Now, he smiles, as he and Madi take the cabin’s other two chairs.

“Making your guests get their own seats,” Madi tuts. “You really should be more hospitable.”

“Yes,” Thomas agrees. “It cost us an arm and a leg to get to you, you know.”

Madi sighs. “That wasn’t funny the first time.” 

“We’ll have to agree to disagree, your majesty.”

Rogers’s eyes flick down to Thomas’s missing arm, and he can see him mouth _‘and a leg.’_ In a miracle of timing, that’s when the door bursts open again, and James and Silver march in.

Thomas doesn’t take his eyes off Rogers, but he can imagine what the governor sees. James, blood-splattered, still holding a sword. Silver with his crutch instead of his fake leg, easier to move in battle.  Just the sight of them makes Thomas believe they four can accomplish impossible things.

He thinks it’s how Catholics must feel, when shown an image of saints.

Rogers looks back to Thomas. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” he says through gritted teeth.

They haven’t. Thomas has been learning to swing a sword instead of a machete, but he’s never going to excel at it like Anne or revel in it like James. Instead, he writes.  He figures he himself is half of Long John Silver these days— when he’d suggested that to Silver, the reaction had been… something.

It’s a treasured memory.

He smiles back at Woodes Rogers. James and Silver step up behind him, and at his side, Madi waits.

“My name is Thomas Hamilton,” he says, for the first time in just over a decade. “I believe you’re familiar with my work.”

 

* * *

 

 

_Three figures move through R’lyeh. They don’t walk as men do— instead they jerk along from some unseen force, legs and arms out at odd angles. One’s neck is twisted nearly backwards. Another’s skull is half crushed._

_They approach the monolith, inside which the mass that is Cthulhu is slowly reforming into a body. The one with the broken neck takes hold of one door, and the one with the crushed skull grabs the other. They swing the doors closed with a thud that doesn’t echo._

_Then the three of them stand, equally spaced in front the doors, facing the rest of the city._

_The water is rising._

_No— the island is sinking._

_The men watch with decaying eyes as the water creeps up to the edge of the walls and begins pouring over the buildings. They watch as the city fills. They don’t move as it covers their feet. Their knees._

_When it reaches their necks, though they should no longer have the power to speak, they whisper as one._

_And then the water closes over their heads as the city of R’lyeh sinks beneath the ocean, their words lingering in the wind:_

                             **_In his house in R_ _’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming._**

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
